New Trend Emerging in Deceptive List Growth?
Several weeks ago I noticed the first of what might be a growing trend of adding email address to a mailing list without allowing the user to choose whether to opt-in or opt-out of the list.
The first instance of this I noticed was a flash-based online petition being run by a presidential candidate's campaign in a popular site's BlogAds. I had never noticed a "signable" petition in the BlogAds, and signed it to satisfy my curiosity for how it worked. I presumed that after entering my email address and pressing submit I would be taken to a page to complete a form with my name and be given an opt-in/opt-out for the candidates email list. Surprisingly, that did not happen, and I was just thanked for signing the petition right there in the ad. Not surprisingly, I began receiving emails from this candidate.
Another instance involved a Senator's PAC that was soliciting input addressing global warming. Before submitting the form you were asked to "Please provide the following information to submit your ranking of global warming priorities and so that we can follow up with you on the results of our survey," and required me to give my name, zip code, and email address to complete the form. If you did not provide my email information to this Senator, my ideas about solving global warming apparently were not important enough to be considered.
Most recently, Mary Ann Akers of the Washington Post accused the John Edwards campaign of automatically adding email addresses of anyone using their "send a note to Elizabeth and John" form to their email lists. When I visited the website there was an opt-in to subscribe to the campaigns list, and Ms. Akers doesn't provide a screenshot as proof. But if her accusation is correct, this would be one more hint that a trend might be emerging.
The DMA publishes a free ethics guide for nonprofits and correctly suggests that, "you should provide choices of opting out online." You can check it out here.
Michael L.
in Email Marketing, Guest Blogs
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We don't think this is a deceptive practice at all. We think it's normal, standard, and acceptable. If nonprofits practice CAN-SPAM compliance, then in the very first email a petition signer gets, there will be an opt-out or unsubscribe option.
Reader Comments (2)
1) All organizations and campaigns clearly state in their Privacy Policy or Terms of Service that an email address you give may (in reality, will) be used for further communication.
2) When subsequent emails are sent, a clear opt-out should be present.
If I enter in my email address to Senator X's petition, what am I to expect? That my email address will just disappear into the ether? No, if I put in my email address somewhere, I expect that it will be used. If I don't want to share my email address, I don't enter it (or enter a fake one). If it means not signing the petition, then so be it.
I don't see how this practice is deceptive at all. It's good e-strategy, and any campaign or political organization worth it's e-salt will implement it. Here's MoveOn's latest petition as an example:
http://pol.moveon.org/paperlessvoting/
The bottom line, especially for political and issue campaigns, is that you are building a community of supporters, not just a list. If we are not up front about our list building process, then we will surely annoy those ensnared by these harvesting efforts, at best. At worst, we may transform a potential supporter into an opponent. Even if we do not turn them off to our issue or candidate, we could end up driving them to another organization or candidate sharing the same issue space.
The most important thing when building a community of activists is to engender trust. If we build our lists without engendering trust we are simply building lists and not a community of supporters. As far as I am concerned, give me a community of 1000 activists who trust me to a list of 100,000 email addresses harvested without any real connection to my campaign anyday.