GDPR has the whole online world in a bit of a spin right now. With many bloggers and businesses reliant on third party tools and services for their marketing, the companies that provide those tools are having to rise to the challenge, and are doing so with varying degrees of proactive consideration for their users’ anxiety levels!
Whilst some have already developed their solutions and have been reassuringly communicating with their customers about it, others are dragging their feet and perhaps don’t realise that they may actually lose customers over this issue.
I’m a customer of [bl id=”2379″]ConvertKit[/bl], and their Facebook user group contains many posts from concerned users, some with a definite hint of panic about them. To be fair to ConvertKit, they have been communicating their plans to address all of the issues, and I’m confident they will. But there are always people who want everything yesterday, and with the deadline of May 25th looming, who can blame them?
There are many aspects to becoming GDPR compliant and this blog post certainly isn’t going to cover that topic (but if you need that kind of guidance, this video interview from Digital Marketer is very helpful).
No, this post is simply about how to create your own tick box on a ConvertKit form, linked to a tag. The idea being that you can create a new tag called “GDPR consent” or similar, and then amend your forms to gather this consent from now on. Optionally, you could use this method to create a new form to seek GDPR consent from your existing list, but you could also do that via a link trigger in an email…
This technique can also be used to add other check boxes, linked to other tags, so it’s potentially very useful.
Apparently this kind of functionality will be included in the main [bl id=”2379″]ConvertKit[/bl] form builder but I’m not sure when. So consider this a temporary workaround.
Thanks to Melissa Thorpe for sharing the code with me. I’ve tweaked it a tiny bit, and it’s reproduced here with kind permission.
How to create a GDPR consent tick box in a ConvertKit form.
Note: this blog post will hopefully become redundant soon after publishing, if/when ConvertKit release the updated form builder they’ve been promising!
Use this code as the basis for a form on your own website. You can modify the code to style it, if you so wish. For example, you could copy the default styles from a regular CK form, or use your own CSS. (But styling forms is not the topic of this post)
The code needs to be modified in a few ways, to make it work with your own ConvertKit account.
Before you start, follow these steps to prepare a new form and your tag(s)
1. Make a new form in ConvertKit and make a note of the ID number. You can do this by mousing over the form name and the address that appears at the bottom left of your browser will contain a link with a 6 digit number. That’s the ID code for your form.
Find your CK form ID code
The custom form we are creating will be linked to this CK form, so go ahead and set up the options around whether to send a confirmation email, and the confirmation page URL etc.
2. Find your ConvertKit API credentials. You will find this long string of characters from the Account Settings menu (top right of the screen). Copy and paste your API key into the code, where it says to do so.
3. Make a new tag for your GDPR consent, and make a note of the ID number. To find the ID number of any tag, mouse over the tag and look at the URL that appears at the bottom of your screen. Each tag has a unique six digit number.
Find the TAG code
4. Optional – within the javascript section you can specify the location of your “thank you” page.
You’ve now got everything you need to make your own custom ConvertKit form that includes a checkbox that will tag users who sign up.
Remember, this is also an opportunity to get more granular about the types of information and/or methods of communication that you want to allow people to opt in for. Simply create additional checkboxes, linked to appropriate tags.
The code!
Here is the basic code for the form. It’s in two sections, the first is the html for the form, the second part is the javascript necessary to submit the data to your CK account, with the correct tag information.
Once you’ve copied the form code over to your site, you need to tweak the html section to match the Form ID, Tag ID and your API key, and optionally, within the javascript section, you can modify the URL of the thank-you page to send people to.
That’s it.
Obviously, you will need to test everything out and check that subscriber data is coming through with the correct tags applied.
I hope that helps you out, particularly if you’re concerned about GDPR consent and want to get a little head start before ConvertKit release the update to their form builder.
Find out more about ConvertKit
What do you think of ConvertKit, or GDPR, or the way that companies like ConvertKit have handled GDPR?
Feel free to leave a comment below.