Mailing List for Prospective parents

[MrsWombat]

Does anyone (SLT or Admin) have a tried and tested way of doing this before I reinvent the wheel?

I'm looking for maybe a form we can put on our website or email to anyone asking about open days and admissions which will capture the data so we can collate it into a mailing list so we can send them invitations and information but they can unsubscribe if they are no longer interested and is a bit more secure than an excel spreadsheet!

Any ideas?

I'm interested to see if you get any bright ideas too! I'm admin and I'm the person responsible for this at my school. At the moment I create a database manually, in Access (bit clunky but v easy to mailmerge from). I get the data from inviting people to email or call me, or to complete an offline form. I'd be very interested in embedding a data capture form in the website though - and/or using a database from which I can directly email (I do this manually too atm). Do please share any ideas you come across!

@underwaterravens My current plan B will be to set something up in Microsoft forms which will collate the info in an excel spreadsheet, so the parents can click a link from the website or an email. But we get a lot of in person enquiries (during normal times) from families where english is not their first language, and it's not a mailing list so people can't unsubscribe.

We've only just moved over to Office 365 so I'm investigating what it can do.

We use Google Forms and this works a treat

@PickledWilly Do you just collate the info on a spreadsheet then? What about GDPR and the data protection act or am I just over thinking it?

I think you're maybe overthinking the GDPR bit. There's no problem keeping a spreadsheet on your secure network, and I don't think they need to be able to unsubscribe automatically as long as you take them off the list if they ask. You should maybe put a note on the website saying what the data will be used for, how long you'll keep it and how they can remove themselves from the list. There are some security concerns around Google though - our DPO advises against Google Forms for data collection. In this instance is it buyer beware though? Or do Microsoft do an equivalent form you could embed?

@underwaterravens Thank you. We've been given some wording to use on a paper form so I will see if I can put that on the electronic form. Microsoft has a system called Forms which works in a similar way to Google Forms and Survey Monkey so that is what I'll probably be using. It saves the document on a spreadsheet.