Whether you are collecting active consent to contact via email, or planning to use the ‘soft opt-in’ available to charities in the UK, Impact Stack offers powerful and flexible options so that you can collect opt-ins according to your organisation’s preferred approach.
NB: In the UK, the Data Use and Access Act 2025 extends the soft opt-in option to charities. A date for this new approach to come into force has not yet been fixed, so while you should start preparing now, you shouldn’t start collecting opt-ins on this basis just yet.
This article covers:
- Adding and configuring your opt-in field
- ‘Active consent’ opt-in - example scenarios
- ‘Soft opt-in’ consent - example scenarios
The information in this article applies to Impact Stack 1. The same range of options will be available in the new version of the software, though the interface to configure them will be a little different.
For best practice guidance, you can also download our opt-ins report here. As always if you’re unsure about something, please do reach out to us using the usual support email address.
Adding and configuring your opt-in field
Adding the field to your form
The email opt-in field is a special field that has lots of helpful functionality for managing your subscriptions. This field will normally have been set up, configured according to your requirements, in your action template for all action types, but if not you can add it by dragging it in from the palette on the right:
To change any of the settings described below, you need to click on the ‘Configure’ icon, the little pencil besides the field:
Supporting content
Your form needs to communicate clearly to your supporter what will happen to their data. The opt-in field has a Label, which can be displayed above or below the checkbox/radio buttons, or hidden,. You can also add a Description - this copy will appear below the opt in question itself. There are also individual labels for a checkbox and for the individual elements of a set of radio buttons.
You can also add additional explanatory copy, including links to your privacy policy, using a ‘markup’ field, placed before or after the opt-in field itself.
You can also use conditionals to show or hide a pop up warning.
If you have an email integration set up
If you are using one of our direct integrations with an email marketing tool (e.g. MailChimp, dotmailer), then you can configure the opt-in field so that when a user opts-in in Impact Stack, they’re automatically subscribed to one (or more) of your email lists.
Choose which lists the user is subscribing to by navigating to the ‘Lists’ tab of the form configuration and toggling on the correct list(s). If no list is selected, data will be captured in Impact Stack but will not be synced to your email tool.
If you are using an automated integration to your CRM via webhooks or you have no integration set up then you will not have this option here.
Opt-in statement
You may have noticed that this newsletter field has an area on it called ‘opt-in statement’.
Impact Stack stores this text along with a log of when and where the user opted in, so you have a clear record of exactly what they saw when they did so. You should put in this field the exact language you are showing to your users as they opt-in, e.g. “I would like to receive charity Y’s emails about campaigning and fundraising”. This might include text from the field Label, Description and any relevant Markup fields.
You should think carefully about this if you are changing the opt-in style you are using. You are likely to want to be able to show any potential investigation by a data protection authority how you have complied with data protection regulations. You are also likely to want to update this in any existing actions if you decide to change those actions from active consent to soft opt-in. Read more about accessing this sign-up data. Read more about accessing this sign-up data.
Radio vs checkbox
Within Impact Stack it’s possible to setup your email opt-in as either a radio or a checkbox. For best practice guidance, download our opt-ins report here.
A checkbox is simply a single square box that you check or don’t.
Radios are these little round fields where you can choose only one answer:
After clicking on configure for the newsletter field, here’s where you choose which one you want:
If you’re using radio buttons:
By using radios rather than a checkbox, you have of course created a new possible answer to your question; the user can now say ‘No’ (rather than just ‘Yes’ and ‘no response’ which are the checkbox options). It’s up to you to decide what this means, and it depends a great deal on how you framed your opt-in question. It’s important that the user knows the implication of choosing ‘No’, one way or the other.
If you don’t want ‘No’ to affect the user’s email subscription at all then simply leave the ‘No (radio) is taken as opt-out’ off, as shown here:
But if you want ‘No’ to act as an unsubscribe from your email list, then of course you should toggle this on. You will of course lose a few supporters this way, see our opt-in report for more advice.
When you do, another slider will appear below, asking if you’d like the unsubscribe to apply to just one email list, or every list that Impact Stack knows about. For example if you maintain a campaigning email list and a separate fundraising email list, and the user chooses ‘no’ when asked if they’d like to be on the campaigning list, you should likely not also unsubscribe them from your fundraising list. It’s entirely up to you how you want to handle this unsubscribe, here’s how the options perform:
Off = the user will be unsubscribed just from the list(s) selected in the ‘lists’ tab of the field
On = the user will be unsubscribed from every list that Impact Stack knows about (ie all of the lists you can see on the ‘lists’ tab).
If your organisation chooses to implement no=unsubscribe, see our articles on adding a warning message to the opt-in field and hiding the opt-in for people on your list already for ways to minimise the number of unsubscribes.
Hiding the form label
If you decide that you don’t want the ‘Title’ of this form field to show to the user (for example if you’re using a markup field above the field instead), simply click on ‘Label display = none’ on the ‘Display’ tab of the setup. You should probably have very descriptive labels on your checkboxes or radio buttons if you do this. For example, “Yes, I’d like to receive your emails”, rather than just “Yes”.
A note on webform conditionals
If you’re using webform conditionals for your form we recommend that you set this up after you’ve finished with building the form. The conditionals available for the newsletter field change depending on how you’ve configured the field, so if you make changes to your newsletter field after setting up conditionals, you should go back and make sure they’re still working.
We recommend you also look at the article on how to add an extra piece of warning text when the user chooses ‘no’ on a radio opt-in field, this can help increase your overall opt in rate.
Collecting active consent to contact
Active consent to contact means that the supporter has made a positive action to indicate that they want to hear from you via email. You can do this in a few different ways in Impact Stack.
Active consent scenario 1: radio buttons, integrated automatic subscription to two lists, no=no change
Animal Rights Worldwide has decided to set their newsletter field up to subscribe users to their main (generic) newsletter list and their separate campaigns list, using a radio button where ‘No’ does not mean an unsubscribe. Their opt-in field would look like this:
Active consent scenario 2: checkbox, no integration
End Oil want to ask users to subscribe to their main email list using a checkbox. They do not have an integrated email tool, so do not need to set anything on the ‘lists’ stage and have a separate data flow set up to get their opt ins into their CRM or mailing tool.
Active consent scenario 3: radio buttons, integration, subscription to one list, no=unsubscribe
Healthcare Access UK wants opting-in supporters to subscribe to their campaigning list only using radio buttons. When the user chooses ‘no’ they want the user to be unsubscribed automatically from that campaigning list only, not any other email lists they're on.
Using double opt-in (confirmation step)
You can choose to set up your forms to require the user to click a confirmation link in an email before their submission is complete, sometimes known as 'double opt-in'. This helps to make sure that the email address a user has submitted is real, and has been submitted by the address owner, who really wants to be on your email list.
You can set up this additional step on the 'Email' step in the wizard. Toggle 'Enable email confirmation' to 'Yes' to set up the additional email, which will include the confirmation link. On the next step (Thank you) the system will then prompt you to also create two thank you pages - one for when the supporter submits the form, and one for when they click the confirmation link.
Collecting consent to contact via ‘soft opt-in’
In the UK, once the Data Use and Access Act 2025 comes into force, it will be permissible for registered charities to collect consent to contact via what’s called a ‘soft opt-in’. See our updated opt-in report for more information.
If your organisation has decided to use a soft opt-in on your forms, here are some examples of how to set this up.
Soft opt-in scenario 1: pre-checked ‘yes’ checkbox
In this case the organisation wants to collect a ‘soft opt-in’, assuming permission to contact since the person is supporting the cause by signing the petition. They’re using a pre-checked box which indicates ‘Yes’ to contact, and offers the supporter the chance to decline by unchecking the box.
The default value=yes is set here, under 'properties'.
So the result looks like this:
Soft opt-in scenario 2: unchecked ‘no’ checkbox
This third organisation is doing the same using an ‘inverted checkbox’. Inverted means here that a check means ‘No’. So the default state is unchecked, with that recorded as permission to contact via soft opt-in. The supporter is offered the chance to decline by checking the box.
They've selected 'Inverted checkbox' on the Display tab.
And set the default to 'Not selected' on the Properties tab.
The result looks like this.
They don’t want existing subscribers to be able to opt out of communications via this form though, so they’ve toggled ‘Interpret a checked inverted checkbox as opt-out’ to OFF.
To make this clear to the user, they’ve added a warning text that appears when ‘No is checked’. Here’s how to do this.
Soft opt-in scenario 3: pre-selected radio button
A third organisation wants to use a Yes/No radio button opt-in field on their petition. This field is set to ‘Yes’ as default, using the soft opt-in, assuming permission to contact since the person is supporting the cause by signing the petition. It offers the supporter the chance to decline by changing the value to ‘No’.
It looks like this.
It’s configured like this with 'Radios' selected on the Display tab, and labels added for the radio buttons.
And 'Opt-in' set as the default on the Properties tab, and a suitable Title and Description.
They’ve chosen to set ‘No’ to mean ‘No change’ by toggling the element ‘Interpret No option as opt out’ to OFF.
They’ve also set up a conditional warning text to appear when ‘No’ is selected. Here's how to do this.
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