There’s less than a handful of months before GDPR comes into force. But there’s still confusion as to the best consent approach. And it’s leading to some potentially catastrophic decisions.

In order to help you better inform your decision making, and approach, we offer these six behavioural science tips:

1)Stay with legitimate interest where you can. You don’t need to be a behavioural scientist to know opt-out beats opt-in by a mile. For direct mail, just make sure you always inform supporters how they could opt-out. In other words, make it clear they can leave anytime they want, but give them content that makes them want to stay.

2) Don’t ask for consent for all channels in one communication. When you give supporters a list of channels to choose from, it’s most likely they’ll pick just one. This will leave you incapable to communicate in any other channel. To avoid this, use the individual channels to gather consent for that channel only.

3) Announcements about privacy and new consent rules might backfire. Sensitising people to an issue that isn’t an issue (for them) might make them wary, which could reduce consent rates. There’s no need to frighten people. You just need to ask them if they’re happy receiving communications from you in a specific channel.

4) Don’t use mail or email to ask for consent, definitely not if it’s opt-in. Think of your current response/open rates. Most people will either ignore what they read or not read it at all. This will immediately kill your database. Instead, use a channel that allows for personal contact e.g. D2D or TM. You’ll ensure supporters have heard you and you’ll increase compliance.

5) Don’t contact everyone at once. Test consent messages with your least valuable segments so you can learn and adapt them before you send them to your most valuable segments. This can be done in any channel, even in TM or D2D and will ensure you go to your most valuable supporters with the best performing message.

6) Adapt message to reflect your supporter’s identity. People support you for a reason. Using TM or D2D allows you to establish their core motivation for support first and to adapt the consent ask accordingly to reflect that. If I’m asked to keep receiving things that I’m interested in, what are the chances of me refusing?

* If you’ve already done one or more of the above, do not despair. It’s not May yet. You can still contact all your supporters and ask for consent. Only this time, do it properly.

** How you frame the consent ask is key. Read how Crisis used behavioural science and multi-variant testing to improve their consent messages here. If you also want to improve your consent message using behavioural science, contact Charlie at chulme@thedonorvoice.com.