Help your community users manage their account preferences

It's important for your community to know how to manage their subscription and notification preferences. This article shows school leaders how to direct their community in managing their Account Preferences in their user profiles, as well as what options are available. 

In this Article

• Step 1: Confirm accounts of users
• Step 2: Confirm Lists names and settings
• Step 3: Try it out yourself
• Step 4: Share resources with your community!
  • Parent Resource: "Manage your account preferences"

Step 1: Confirm accounts of users

In order to allow users to manage their own account preferences, subscriptions, and notifications, each user must have an account in Constituent Manager. 

Step 2: Confirm Lists names and settings

Your community users will be able to manage their subscriptions by viewing and selecting their preferences based on the names of Lists that you have created in the Lists feature in Messages. Here are a few things to check on: 

• List Names: it's helpful when they are topic-based, (e.g. Weekly Upper School Newsletter) and easy for users to identify. 
• Privacy Settings: set privacy to "Everyone" to ensure users have the ability to view and subscribe to those lists.

Step 3: Try it out yourself

The way your community users will log in will look a bit different than the way that admin users log in to the Finalsite platform. Before you instruct your community how to do this, it will help you to put yourselves in their shoes. You can log in as a portal user so you can see how users can manage their account preferences. Here's how it works:

• In Constituent Manager, locate one of your users that is a Portal User. 
• Click on the Portal User's Account tab. Click the button that says Log in as this portal user.
  
• Navigate to the top left corner where you see the portal user's name.
• Hover until the dropdown menu appears. 
  
  

Profile 

The Profile area is first. This is where your portal users can manage their profile. 

Here, users can complete the following tasks:

• Profile tab: Edit Profile
• Picture tab: Change Profile Picture, Upload a new image, or Choose from a directory photo
• Account tab: Edit Account Info, change password.
• Subscriptions tab: View the email address listed on the account, see Current Subscriptions and Message Notifications
  
  • Click Settings to manage Notification Settings. 
  • Message notifications: Change where user will receive notifications. 
• Logoff: Log out of the account.

Notifications (and Preferences)

When selecting Notifications from the dropdown, a window will open that allows users to manage both Notifications and Preferences.

Notifications tab

• Expand out the items in the Notifications tab to see which communication lists this user is subscribed to and which email address they will go to.
• Do they want to unsubscribe? Uncheck the box below a certain communication list. 
  
• Manage other subscriptions button: Maybe the user is subscribed to blogs or alerts on the website? They can also manage those subscriptions here. 
• + Subscription: Want to add a Subscription or see which ones this user has Unsubscribed to? Click the + Subscription button in the top right corner, expand out each list, and check the box to Subscribe or Resubscribe. 
  
  

Preferences tab

• Click on the Preferences tab to adjust Subscription preferences. 

  

Subscription Levels:

• All Messages: User will be added to any mailing list, and it is the user's responsibility to unsubscribe if not wanting to receive messages from that list.
• Invite Only: When user is added to a list, they will immediately receive a message that notifies them that they were added to the list, asking to accept the invitation.
  • User won't receive any other messages from the list unless they accept this invite.
  • User status will be listed as Invited until they accept.
• My Choice: Selecting this option means the user will be listed as Unsubscribed when being added to any mailing lists. User can add themselves to mailing lists by going to Notifications from their portal menu.
• No Messages: User will not receive messages from any mailing list as well as any board, calendar or athletic alerts to which they are currently subscribed.

Step 4: Share this resource with your community

Here is a step-by-step guide for your parents and guardians so that they will know how to manage their account preferences when logged in as portal users.