Dear ISTFP members,
The 7th ISTFP conference ended just over two months ago, and I am still reflecting on how stimulating it was, both intellectually and emotionally. Like me, those of you who attended were able to witness our strong sense of community that prevails despite the challenges to group cohesion wonderfully described during the conference by Miguel Angel Gonzalez Torres.
Our sense of community strengthens each of us in numerous ways, so it is important that we nurture this sense of community on an ongoing basis. One way to accomplish this is to enhance our ability to share different skills and resources.
To formalize this ability to share and communicate, the ISTFP’s Public Relations and Communications Committee is creating a complimentary service that will be provided to all TFP groups. We call this service “The ISTFP Mailing List Project”. This will be especially relevant to those of you who plan lectures, trainings, and other academic events.
What is a mailing list?
A mailing list is a collection of names and emails used by an organization to send the same information to a group of people. It is the foundation of email marketing, the most efficient way for the ISTFP to communicate with it’s members and to promote lectures or training events to mental health professionals at large.
To fulfill those two objectives, we plan to build two mailing lists.
- The ISTFP MEMBERS mailing list
- As a member, you are already registered on that list.
- Since your subscription as a member of the ISTFP is an implicit consent to be on the list, we will ask you to explicitly agree to be included in that list. You will understand why as you read on.
- o If you agree to be on that list, you will receive the ISTFP member’s newsletter every 3 months with the latest information about the ISTFP’s activities and latest news about our group. This member’s privilege gives you access to:
- Latest ISTFP Headlines
- Latest actions of your Public Relations and Communications Committee
- A reader’s digest of recent TFP articles with links the PDFs
- Summary of the work done by other committees
- Interviews with members of our group
- Communications offered by friends of the ISTFP like the ISSPD
- An exhaustive list of all lectures, trainings, and other academic events.
- The ISTFP MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS mailing list
- This list is aimed at mental health professionals who are not members of the ISTFP. It is for everyone who works in the field and may want to learn about TFP.
- It will be our main mean of communication with non-members and, we hope, will be a way to disseminate the model, recruit new trainees and ISTFP members.
- By subscribing to this list, professionals will get, every three months, a list of upcoming lectures, trainings, and other academic events organized by you, the local TFP groups, and the ISTFP conference. They will also receive information about latest TFP books and where to purchase them.
- o Using the “Send in Blue” email platform, we will build a contact list that will help you generate the maximum number of participants possible for meetings, conferences, workshops, and seminars.
What makes a good mailing list?
In order to be effective and safe, email marketing has to follow data protection regulations for all countries.
For example, violation of the European Union’s privacy laws (GDPR) exposes any organization to a fine of 2% of its worldwide revenue, up to 10 million EUROS. The TFP Mailing List project follows the GDPR guidelines as they are the most onerous, complying with the highest standards in email marketing.
According to the spirit of regulations and good practices in the field of online marketing, readers must receive promotional emails only if they actively choose to be part of a particular mailing list. This means that each reader must consent to receive promotional emails. In the regulation lingo, this is called “opting-in”. Readers also have to be given the opportunity to stop receiving promotions they are no longer interested in receiving. In the regulation lingo, this is called “opting-out”.
Following regulations not only protects us from fines but also makes campaigns more successful because you will be sending promotions to people with true interest in what you are offering. It also protects the reputation of TFP on the internet. When too many people report your promotional email as “spam”, your email address or website will be considered untrustworthy by internet authorities. This can have disastrous consequences on the ranking of your website on search engines like Google.
What is an adequate subscription process.
To respect the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), your subscription process and the way you use the personal data that is gathered by that process has to respect several rights. The Send in Blue Privacy Policies are a good example of those rights:
1- Right to rectification: You can rectify your personal information at any time from your account settings. You can also contact us to edit or rectify your information for you.
2- Right to be forgotten: You can cancel your Send in Blue subscription and close your account at any time. You can send us a request to erase all your data, which we will complete within 30 days.
3- Right to portability: Upon request, we will export your data so that it can be transferred to a third party or competitor.
4- Right to object: You can unsubscribe at any time to any specific use of your information (newsletter, automatic emails, etc.).
5- Right of access: We are transparent about the data that we collect and what we do with it. To familiarize yourself with this, please refer to our privacy policy. You can conta
With the help of the Send in Blue platform, we will built contact lists that are in conformity with these guidelines.
The ISTFP mailing list for members
To implement the ISTFP Mailing List Project, our committee has built a two-step subscription process. By requesting to subscribe and later confirming your request, we ensure you are not mindlessly subscribing to receive unwanted emails. This process is called “double opting-in”.
You can see a simulation of that process by confirming that you consent to the ISTFP MEMBER’S list. If you do not confirm your intent, you will stop receiving the ISTFP newsletter. If you change your mind, you can subscribe to the list by going to the members area of the ISTFP website:
CONFIRM MY SUBSCRIPTION TO THE ISTFP MEMBER’S mailing LIST
This is an example of the contact list that will be generated by this process:
As you can see, it specifies that the contact explicitly agreed to subscribe to the mailing list twice (OPT_IN and DOUBLE_OPT-IN). This allows us to comply to the highest standard of data privacy protection and to gather electronic proof that we have done so.
How to help us build the ISTFP MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS mailing list
- Invite your contacts to subscribe to the ISTFP Mental health professionals mailing list.
- Ten years ago, members who wanted to organize TFP events would just gather email addresses of colleagues from different local sources and promote their activities from personal email addresses. You did it, I did it, we all did it because we thought it was the only way. But as years went by, unsolicited advertisement email (spam) became a plague that called for regulations that we now must comply with.
- Does it mean that all the work you put in gathering emails was for nothing? Not necessarily. You could use those contacts to help us build a regulations compliant international mailing list that will serve the whole community.
- The process is simple, just copie this link and invite your contacts to click on it.
- Insert the previous link on your home webpage with a text inviting visitors to subscribe to the ISTFP mental health professionals mailing list.
- You can mention that in doing so, they will receive every three months, an email with a list of all upcoming TFP events happening around the world. They will also receive three specific emails in the two months preceding the Biennial ISTFP Conference like we did for the Innsbruck conference promotion.
- Be aware that many of these contacts might not consent. But even that is a blessing, because there is a better chance that those who agree will end up registering to our events.
Why would your local group invite their contacts to subscribe to the ISTFP Mailing List?
As the leader of a local TFP group, you probably have your own contact list to promote local TFP activities. If you invite your contacts to subscribe to the ISTFP Mailing List, you give them access TFP events happening all over the world.
You are also getting your TFP local event international exposure. Since more people will be aware of your activities, those activities will have a better chance of being successful.
“The TFP events mailing list” is one of the new privileges that is paid for by your member’s fee. If you want to support more initiatives like this one, invite your colleagues to become ISTFP members. Give us the means to help TFP grow.
Always yours,
Mathieu Norton-Poulin
On behalf of the PR committee
