Connect Dotdigital so that contacts and their email consent stay in step in both directions. ThirdSectorBee sends the contacts who have agreed to hear from you, with their consent choices, to Dotdigital. Unsubscribes, complaints, bounces, preference-centre changes and form responses in Dotdigital come back to the contact’s record.
Before you start
- Dotdigital must be switched to Enabled on the Integrations overview. See enable a service first.
- Changing any Dotdigital setting needs
dotdigital:settings:change. - Have a Dotdigital API user (its email address and password) ready, and know your account’s region.
- Set up the consent purposes you want to share, with an Email channel. Nothing is sent until at least one is mapped.
Enabling Dotdigital adds nine touchpoint types to your beehive, so that what happens in Dotdigital can appear on timelines: [Dotdigital] Unsubscribed, [Dotdigital] ISP complaint, [Dotdigital] Direct complaint, [Dotdigital] Suppressed, [Dotdigital] Hard bounce, [Dotdigital] Soft bounce, [Dotdigital] Mail blocked, [Dotdigital] Domain suppression and [Dotdigital] Form submitted. Disabling the integration hides these types again; touchpoints already recorded stay on the timeline. It adds no payment methods or custom fields.
Connect
- Open Integrations → Dotdigital. The Settings tab opens.
- Choose the Region: r1 (UK), r2 (US) or r3 (AU). It appears in your Dotdigital account address, for example r1-app.dotdigital.com.
- Enter API user email and API password.
- Turn on Outbound sync enabled when you’re ready for contacts to be sent, and choose Connect Dotdigital.
Once saved, the Settings tab shows when Dotdigital was last checked (“Last successful check in Dotdigital: …”, or “Not yet checked in Dotdigital”), and a count of unresolved errors with a pointer to Logs. The password is never shown again. To change credentials, enter both a new API user and a new password and choose Save changes; leave both blank to keep the existing pair while changing other settings.
Choose what is shared
Preference mappings. On this tab, choose Add mapping, pick a Consent purpose and the Dotdigital preference it controls, then choose Save mappings. Only mapped purposes are kept in step, and only for the email channel. Until at least one mapping is saved, the Settings tab reminds you that “No contacts are sent to Dotdigital until at least one consent purpose is mapped on the Preference mappings tab.”
List mappings. Choose Add mapping, pick a contact Tag and the Dotdigital address book it fills, then choose Save mappings. Contacts carrying the tag are kept in that address book, and taken out of it when the tag is removed.
Both tabs ask you to connect on the Settings tab first if you haven’t.
Who is sent to Dotdigital
A contact is sent when all of these are true:
- they aren’t marked as a child or as deceased;
- they have an email address;
- their email consent is yes under at least one mapped consent purpose.
For each contact sent, ThirdSectorBee shares their email address, first and last name, each mapped preference (opted in where their email consent under that purpose is yes, opted out otherwise) and the address books their tags map to. A contact new to Dotdigital is added as subscribed.
When a contact stops qualifying (they withdraw consent, are marked as a child or deceased, or lose their email address), ThirdSectorBee opts them out of the mapped preferences and unsubscribes them in Dotdigital. If they later qualify again, they’re resubscribed only if it was ThirdSectorBee that unsubscribed them; someone who unsubscribed in Dotdigital themselves isn’t resubscribed without being asked. Deleting a contact in ThirdSectorBee deletes the record ThirdSectorBee created for them in Dotdigital.
Send your existing contacts once
New and changed contacts are sent automatically. For the people already in your beehive, choose Sync existing contacts on the Settings tab once after connecting. Every contact is checked against the rules above, so only consenting contacts are sent. While it runs you’ll see “Running — N contacts queued so far.” and afterwards “Last run finished … — N contacts queued.”
As well as sending the contacts, it links each one to its Dotdigital record, which lets changes coming back from Dotdigital find the right person straight away. Until a contact is linked, ThirdSectorBee matches on email address instead.
Collect form responses
On the Form subscriptions tab, choose Add subscription, pick a form from your Dotdigital account, then choose Map questions. For each question, choose what the answer Fills in:
- Nothing (timeline note only).
- A contact field: First name, Last name, Mobile, Phone, Address line 1 to 3, Town or city, Postcode or Country. Questions that Dotdigital already links to a contact data field start mapped. The email question is “Used to match the respondent”.
- Consent. Choose the Consent purpose, the Channel, the Answers that mean yes and the Answers that mean no. Any other answer, including an unticked box, changes nothing.
Choose Apply, then Save subscriptions. Responses are collected from when the form was first saved here; earlier responses aren’t imported, and nothing is collected until a mapping is saved.
For each completed response, ThirdSectorBee looks for the person by email address, then by their Dotdigital record, then by mobile number:
- A match gets a [Dotdigital] Form submitted timeline entry listing every question and answer, and any consent they gave. Mapped contact fields are filled in only where the contact has no value; an address is filled in only when the contact has no address at all. If several contacts match, each gets the timeline entry and consent, but no fields are filled in.
- No match creates a new contact from the response, which then gets the timeline entry and consent on a later check. A response with no email address that matches nobody is skipped.
What comes back from Dotdigital
ThirdSectorBee checks Dotdigital about every 15 minutes. The first check also reads your whole history of suppressions, so people who unsubscribed before you connected are corrected too.
| What happened in Dotdigital | Their email consent in ThirdSectorBee | Timeline entry |
|---|---|---|
| The person unsubscribed | Set to No for every mapped purpose | Unsubscribed |
| The person complained (to their email provider or to you directly) | Set to No for every mapped purpose | ISP complaint, or Direct complaint |
| Your staff suppressed the contact | Set to No for every mapped purpose | Suppressed |
| The email hard bounced, soft bounced, was blocked, or the domain is suppressed | No change | Hard bounce, Soft bounce, Mail blocked or Domain suppression |
| The person opted out of a mapped preference | Set to No for that purpose | None (shown in the consent history) |
| The person opted in to a mapped preference | Set to Yes for that purpose | None (shown in the consent history) |
| A preference you haven’t mapped | Ignored | None |
Things worth knowing:
- Only the consent purposes and channel named by the change are updated. Everything else on the contact keeps its value and history, and each change is recorded in the consent history with Dotdigital as the source.
- An older change never overwrites a newer one. If someone unsubscribed in Dotdigital and later gave consent again in ThirdSectorBee, their consent stays as it is.
- A child is always kept at No, and consent isn’t switched on for a contact marked as deceased.
- If several contacts share one email address, all of them receive the consent change, but none is linked to the Dotdigital record.
- Someone who is in Dotdigital but not in ThirdSectorBee is skipped. A suppression never creates a contact.
- Unsubscribes that ThirdSectorBee itself sent to Dotdigital, because the contact withdrew consent here, aren’t recorded again as the person’s own request.
Check the Logs
The Logs tab lists problems that stopped data moving, most recent first, with when each was Last seen, its Direction (From Dotdigital or To Dotdigital), how many Times it happened, and a Status of Unresolved or Resolved. Where a problem concerns one person, View contact opens their record. “No errors. Data is moving normally.” means there’s nothing to fix. Busy periods when Dotdigital asks ThirdSectorBee to slow down are retried automatically and aren’t logged.
| Log message | What to do |
|---|---|
| Dotdigital rejected the API user or password. | Nothing transfers until you enter working credentials on the Settings tab |
| A preference mapping names a consent purpose that was renamed or deleted. | Consent changes are held, not lost. Choose a current purpose on Preference mappings and save. The tab also says “Dotdigital sync is paused: …” until you do |
| Dotdigital refused this contact (status …). | Usually an invalid email address. Correct the contact and it’s tried again |
| This contact’s Dotdigital record is already linked to a different ThirdSectorBee contact. | Check whether the two contacts are the same person |
| Dotdigital returned an error (status …), or an error for address book … | Check the address book still exists in Dotdigital and the list mapping is current |
| ThirdSectorBee could not finish checking Dotdigital. | This is retried automatically; contact support if it keeps happening |
| A question mapped on the form “…” no longer exists in Dotdigital. | That mapping is skipped; the rest still apply. Update the form’s mapping |
| A consent mapping on the form “…” names a consent purpose or channel that was renamed or deleted. | That consent isn’t recorded until you choose a current purpose in Map questions |
| The form “…” was not found in Dotdigital. | If it was deleted, remove it from Form subscriptions |
| A response to the form “…” matched no contact, and creating one did not succeed within a day. | Its touchpoint and consent weren’t recorded. Add the person by hand if needed |
If something is missing
Check the region, the Outbound sync enabled switch, that at least one preference mapping is saved, that the contact’s email consent is yes under a mapped purpose, and the Logs tab. To pause sending, turn Outbound sync enabled off and choose Save changes.