At the end of April, Pooka hosted another CiviCRM Scotland Meetup in Edinburgh and online, bringing together charities, membership organisations, developers, and digital teams using CiviCRM across the UK.
This session focused on something that comes up in almost every conversation around digital communications and supporter engagement: email communications, UK GDPR, and how organisations can use CiviCRM and CiviMail more effectively, and more compliantly.
The meetup included a practical introduction to communications tools within CiviCRM from Marcus, alongside a deeper dive into UK GDPR, consent, mailing lists, and data protection workflows from Mads.
As always, one of the best parts of these meetups was the conversation itself. Real organisations sharing how they actually use CiviCRM day-to-day, the challenges they face, and the workarounds they’ve discovered along the way.
Exploring Communications in CiviCRM
Marcus kicked off the session with a practical overview of the different types of communications organisations commonly managed inside CiviCRM.
A key theme throughout the session was that communications in CiviCRM are not just about newsletters. They can include:
- Bulk marketing emails and newsletters
- Membership and donation communications
- Event confirmations and reminders
- Transactional emails and receipts
- Internal communications
- Mail merges and postal communications
- Filing and tracking individual emails against contact records.
Using CiviMail alongside tools like Mosaico (akin to the graphical editors in other Newsletter Builders such as MailChimp), organisations can create and send branded newsletters directly from within CiviCRM, keeping mailing lists, contact data, and engagement history all in one place.
Marcus demonstrated how organisations can:
- Create mailing groups for supporters, volunteers, members, or boards
- Build and schedule newsletters
- Use drag-and-drop email templates
- Personalise emails with tokens and merge fields
- Automate reminders for memberships and events
- Send transactional communications like invoices or confirmations
One particularly useful takeaway was how deeply integrated communications are with the wider CRM.
Emails aren’t “floating” in a separate platform. They sit alongside memberships, activities, donations, relationships, and events, creating a much fuller picture of how people engage with an organisation.
For smaller charities and membership bodies especially, that joined-up approach can save huge amounts of admin time.
The Difference Between Marketing and Transactional Emails
One of the most valuable parts of the session was Mads’ explanation of the difference between marketing emails and transactional emails, something that often causes confusion.
Transactional emails include things like:
- Membership renewal reminders
- Event confirmations
- Password resets
- Receipts and invoices
- Donation acknowledgements.
These are generally sent because an organisation needs to fulfil a service or contractual obligation.
Marketing emails are different.
As Mads explained, under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), most direct marketing emails require consent, even if organisations don’t always think of them as “marketing”.
In practice, this means many newsletters, campaign updates, and supporter communications fall under direct marketing rules.
So while it might be tempting to use your receipts and password reminder emails to sneakily deliver a few marketing messages without needing consent, think again. While it looks like an opportunity to beat the system, what you’re actually doing is turning transactional emails into emails for which you really ought to have consent.
Why Double Opt-In Matters
A major focus of the session was consent management and newsletter subscriptions within CiviCRM.
Mads demonstrated how organisations can configure double opt-in processes using Form Builder and CiviMail – ensuring that people genuinely confirm they want to join a mailing list before being subscribed.
This is particularly useful for:
- Public newsletter sign-up forms
- Event registrations
- Staff manually adding contacts to newsletters
- Membership sign-up journeys.
Instead of someone being added immediately to a mailing list, CiviCRM sends a confirmation email asking them to verify their subscription.
That extra step creates a clearer audit trail and reduces the risk of accidental or inappropriate subscriptions.
One especially practical example discussed was how staff members can trigger newsletter sign-ups on behalf of supporters, while still ensuring the individual themselves confirms consent via email.
For charities and membership organisations juggling compliance alongside busy workloads, these kinds of workflows can make day-to-day GDPR management significantly easier.
Filing Emails and Shared Communication Histories
The meetup also explored how organisations can file and track communications directly inside CiviCRM.
Marcus demonstrated how staff can:
- Send emails directly from contact records
- Use reusable templates
- Store communication histories
- Link emails to memberships, activities, and events.
For teams, this can be incredibly useful.
Rather than communications living inside one person’s inbox, important interactions can become part of the organisation’s shared knowledge, accessible to other authorised team members when needed.
The session also touched on Outlook 365 integrations and automated email filing using catch-all addresses.
Again, the strength of CiviCRM here is that communications become part of the wider relationship history, not disconnected from the rest of the CRM.
A Caution Around the GDPR Extension
One of the most interesting parts of the meetup was Mads’ thoughtful discussion around the CiviCRM GDPR extension.
Rather than criticising the extension outright, the conversation focused on the importance of understanding what tools actually do, and where caution may be needed.
A key takeaway was that installing a GDPR extension does not automatically make an organisation “GDPR compliant”.
Compliance comes from processes, policies, staff understanding, and careful configuration based on the specific needs of your organisation, not simply adding a plugin.
Mads also highlighted potential concerns around:
- Unleashing “Forget Me” workflows without effectively deduping your contact records first, potentially resulting in deleting data you ought to have kept.
- Assuming that data erasure requests mean you have to delete all data – you don’t!
- Thinking that compliance boils down to adding a checkbox that says “I accept the data policy”. Not only is it not going to help your compliance, it can actually highlight that you don’t fully understand your responsibilities.
Why CiviCRM Meetups Matter
One of the things we love most about the CiviCRM Scotland Meetups is that they bring together people from very different perspectives. Some attendees are deeply technical. Others are completely new to CiviCRM.
That mix is important.
Because often the most useful insights don’t come from polished presentations, they come from someone saying: “We ran into this exact problem last month…”
This meetup included conversations around smart groups, unsubscribe handling, newsletter analytics, open tracking, training opportunities, and upcoming CiviCRM events across the UK.
It’s collaborative, practical, and refreshingly open, exactly what open-source communities should feel like.
Watch the Session and Explore Further
If you missed the meetup, you can catch up with the full session and explore some of the tools discussed below:
- CiviCRM: CiviCRM Official Website
- CiviMail Documentation: CiviMail Documentation
- Form Builder Extension: Form Builder Extension
CiviCRM Birmingham Conference: CiviCRM Birmingham 2026
Join the Next CiviCRM Scotland Meetup
We’ll be back with another meetup later this year, both online and in person in Edinburgh at The Melting Pot.
Whether you’re completely new to CiviCRM, managing memberships for a charity, wrestling with mailing lists, or deep into workflows and integrations, you’re very welcome.
There’s always tea. Usually biscuits. And often at least one unexpectedly useful conversation that saves somebody several hours of future frustration.
Get In Touch
We’d love to hear what you’re up to. Please get in touch using hello@pooka.co or through the form linked below. Don’t be shy!
