When a supporter tells you how they’d like to hear from you, or asks you to stop, record it on their profile straight away. Consent is held separately for each purpose (such as a newsletter or fundraising appeals) and each channel (Email, Mail, Phone, SMS or WhatsApp), so agreeing to email about one purpose never implies agreement to anything else.

Before you start

  • You need relationships:write:contacts to change consent, and you must be able to see the contact’s consent (it can be restricted; see below).
  • The purposes and their channels come from Relationships → Configuration → Communications consent. If the panel says no communication purposes have been configured, ask an administrator to add them; see Relationships settings.
  1. Open the contact and find Communications consent.
  2. Choose Edit. The panel shows one row per active purpose and one column per channel.
  3. Select a channel’s button to move it through Yes, No and Unknown. A changed answer shows in a darker colour, and hovering over it shows the saved value.
  4. Optionally choose Add a note under a purpose and write the reason for the change, for example “Asked to stop calls at the March event”.
  5. Choose Save changes, or Cancel to discard everything you staged.

You can also set consent while adding a contact, and in the Consent section of Edit contact, where the choices are labelled OK, No and Unknown.

Review the history

Choose Change log on the panel. Each entry shows the purpose, the channel, the change (for example Unknown → Yes), when it happened, who made it and any note. Consent changes also appear in the profile’s Activity feed under the Consent filter.

Things that affect what you can record

  • Children. When a contact is marked Child, every answer is set to No and the consent controls are locked: “Communications consent is disabled for contacts marked as a child.” ThirdSectorBee also enforces this when the record is saved.
  • Inactive purposes. An archived purpose shows as Inactive, or Inactive — read only while you’re editing. Its answers are kept but can’t be changed.
  • Unknown purpose. Answers recorded against a purpose that has since been renamed or removed appear greyed out with an Unknown purpose badge. They can’t be edited.
  • Restricted consent. If someone has restricted this contact’s consent details, the panel shows who can see them instead of the answers. See Restrict who can see a record.

Contact-facing sends check consent before anything goes out. For example, emailing a segment asks you to choose a consent purpose, and contacts without a Yes for that purpose on email are not sent to. Children and deceased contacts are never sent to. Segment conditions on a consent channel match a Yes under any purpose, so check the purpose before you contact people; see Segment operators.

If something goes wrong

If you see “Could not save consent changes. Please try again.”, nothing was saved; try again, and check you still have permission to edit the contact.