Soft opt-in is back. Is that a good thing?

As of February 2026, charities are allowed to use soft opt-in again to add people to their email lists. But will you - and should you - do it?

Everybody in the charity sector remembers the upheaval when GDPR came into force… no longer could you add anybody to your supporter email list unless they explicitly opted in.

Well, that’s now changed. Although the exact requirements of the PECR are still unclear (the Fundraising Regulator urges caution for now), it’s probably safe to assume that - like when you buy something from an online shop - charities will be allowed to add someone who donates to them to their email list, as long as there’s a clear opportunity to opt out.

But having gone through the whole GDPR process… do you want to row it back and return to soft opt-in? It sounds great, but we can see pros and cons.

The pros

• You’ll get more people on your email lists - and therefore more potential future donors.

• The sign-up process will be simpler.

• Less stress about how you recorded each subscriber’s explicit consent to receive your emails (probably).

The cons

• The quality of your email list may decrease as it includes more people who are less interested in your charity.

• Your open and click rates may decrease, and unsubscribes increase, all of which reduces your emails’ deliverability until your emails are sent to everybody’s spam folder.

• People perceiving your newsletter as spam they didn’t sign up for can reduce trust in your charity and make you seem annoying.

What’s the best approach for you?

We’re waiting for the Fundraising Regulator and the ICO to publish their final guidance to charities around this change. It may be that charities will be permitted to add people to their lists if they have merely contacted the charity, attended an event, sponsored a friend, etc. But is that a good idea?

The GDPR process was terrible at the time, but one positive effect was charities cleaning their email lists, so that only the most invested and keen supporters remained. Suddenly, they were only emailing people who actively did want to hear from them! A list like that is smaller, but much more valuable for fundraising and campaigns than a list of cold supporters who were just added by default. We have seen “quality not quantity” paying off.

However, it has been frustrating that charities couldn’t add people who actually donated to them. We would say these were warm contacts who were invested enough in the cause to part with their money. It’s a shame that many of these people - who could have raised awareness and funds - haven’t gone further in their support because they didn’t want to sign up to another email list that day.

If all that most charities do in the future is change their donation process to opt in people who actually donate, that seems like a good basic approach which balances the pros and cons of soft opt-in.

But every charity needs to weigh the pros and cons of their own situation. For instance: how does your charity find and make new contacts? How invested are different groups of people? Not everybody needs to be added to the same list. Do you have the capacity to manage several different levels of email lists so that the lowest level isn’t too demanding for the recipients? Can you set up and manage supporter journeys to warm up the cold contacts you’ve acquired?

This change in the guidance is a good opportunity to think again about who you really want to communicate with, and how. We’d be interested to hear about your plans.