Hi,

I assume that you have picked up this information when you have gone into Manage Website at the bottom of the page and then clicked onto Users & Permissions.  The Email Opt-In column indicates whether your members have opted in to receive emails that are sent by the system.  These may be emails generated through the Email heading to the right (under the Users & Permissions tab) or emails generated either as a result of a Blog or Noticeboard entry (everytime a blog is written or a Notice published an email goes out to all members who have opted in).

When a new Members is invited to join the group the system does not automatically default to opting them into receiving emails.  They have to make amendments in Your Account (once they have logged in).  You can check your own status by going into Your Account and you will have 3 tabs.  The first one allows you to change details like the default email address.  The second tab indicates which groups you belong to.  The third tab is about email preferences.  They need to tick the box on the left hand side next to your organisation's name and then on the right-hand side use the drop-down menu to default to Instant.  (If you are a local administrator you may wish to tick all the boxes on this page to receive notifications).  

I manage the website for a large group of about 100 people and I inherited an opt-in figure of probably 85-90%.  As this is our only communications route (e.g. for GDPR reasons we don't keep phone numbers for text messaging) I have now managed to persuade everyone to opt-in to receiving emails.  This has meant sitting down with some members (before Covid-19) and going through the steps with them on a 1-2-1 basis. 

There is a bug on the system.  If you have a member registered in both the public and private areas and in attempt to tidy the system up you delete them from the public area you will find that if they have previously opted-in to receiving email messages the system will change their preference to opt-out.  This means that they then need to go back into their account and change it back to opt-in.

Having members who have opted-in to receiving emails means that your internal comms becomes very effective.

It would be useful if local administrators could go into the system and make these changes for members, or if the default position was Opt-In rather than Opt-Out.