Group subscriptions allow a single payer to manage multiple recipients—register, switch, cancel, and optionally edit recipient data (e.g. address). Each group subscription can include unlimited recipient subscriptions.
In a simple scenario, for example, Mayor Jensen pays for 10 employees at City Hall, who each receive their own magazine at home.
This guide covers:
Terminology
Creating group and recipient campaigns
Setting up pricing
Creating a group administrator and assigning permissions
Linking group recipients and their subscriptions
Daily administration of group subscriptions
Terminology
Group campaign: A campaign with group functionality enabled.
Recipient campaign: A campaign under a group campaign that recipients can subscribe to.
Group subscription: The main subscription based on the group campaign, with a payer who can manage many recipients.
Group administrator: The subscriber with the group subscription, who can manage recipients via self-service login. E.g. City Hall / Mayor Jensen.
Recipient subscriber or group recipient: A recipient under the group subscription, e.g. Secretary Jørgensen. (We call it a “recipient” because they typically receive a publication, though that’s not required – the point is that a recipient receives a service while the invoice is sent to the payer.)
Recipient subscription: The individual subscription each recipient holds - e.g. Secretary Jørgensen’s subscription.
Creating group and recipient campaigns
To enable group subscriptions, you must first set up a group campaign with associated recipient campaigns.
Create a recipient campaign
When creating a group campaign, you need to have recipient campaigns ready, so you should consider those first.
It’s not necessary to create separate campaigns for recipients, but you can do so if, for example, you offer a different price than for regular subscribers or use a price ladder. Otherwise, you can use existing campaigns as recipient campaigns.
Create a group campaign
Create a group campaign as usual, but enable group functionality by checking the appropriate box.
This gives you the option to add recipient campaigns and, if needed, limit how many recipients can be part of a specific campaign, or how many recipients can receive the subscription for free before charging per recipient begins (e.g. 5 recipients included in the base price; if this number is exceeded, the 6th and subsequent recipients are charged according to the price set in the recipient campaign).
In our example with a town hall employing 10 staff members, the group campaign could include one recipient campaign offering a digital-only product and another campaign offering both print and digital products, which employees can choose between.
Group campaigns in the campaign overview
You can identify group campaigns by the fact that they always have at least one recipient campaign attached. In the campaign overview, any campaign with recipient campaigns linked to it is a group campaign.
To make filtering easier, you can, for example, use a naming convention that allows filtering by name, or you can create a custom field for campaigns to filter by.
Pricing setup
The price can be set at two levels: on the group campaign and on the recipient campaign. You can choose to use only one of them, but you can also use both. Here are a few examples:
Pricing only on the recipient campaign: This is most suitable when the buyer is a small company with a few recipients and only wants to pay for what they receive.
Pricing only on the group campaign: This is the best choice when the customer has a large number of recipients and you don't want to count them individually. In this case, you can offer a fixed price, and all recipients are considered “free.”
Pricing on both the group and recipient campaigns: This can be the ideal option when dealing with medium-sized businesses. You can agree on a fixed price for a certain number of recipients, while any recipients beyond that number are billed additionally. Alternatively, you can set up a tiered pricing model on the recipient campaign, where the price per recipient decreases as the number of recipients increases.
Group administrator and permissions
Group Administrator as the Primary Recipient
Quite often, small group subscriptions are sold to small and medium-sized businesses or as family subscriptions. In these cases, you charge a base price for the first recipient and allow others to be added as additional readers. This setup is the default - meaning the person who signs up for the subscription and becomes the group administrator also receives the products configured in the campaign.
Group Administrator as an Administrative Role Only
Sometimes, you may want the group administrator to serve purely an administrative function. In this scenario, the group administrator receives no access to digital products and does not receive printed publications - only invoices. For example, at the City Hall, the secretary may act as the administrator without receiving anything. This is useful because invoices will always be sent to the correct person in the organization, even if someone else takes over the role later.
For group subscriptions where the administrator is not a subscriber, you need to check the box for “Pro forma subscription”:
The group administrator is a purely administrative role. If the group administrator should also receive the subscription product, they must be added as a recipient under the same group subscription.
If the group administrator also wants to receive publications
It may happen that the secretary at City Hall would also like to read the magazine, so in addition to paying for the subscription, they also become a recipient. The easiest way to handle this is by adding a recipient subscription alongside the group subscription. In other words, the same subscriber will now have two subscriptions:
One is the group subscription with 10 recipients attached, and the other is a recipient subscription under their own group subscription (which means there will ultimately be 11 recipients).
Creating the Group Subscription
In our example, City Hall is created as the group administrator.
The group administrator is created via the publisher interface in exactly the same way as a regular subscriber. However, you should leave out any secondary payer, and it’s recommended to remove the "Other payer" field from the order form.
When creating the subscription via the order form, you first enter the group administrator’s details, and then you can add recipients one by one.
Linking group recipients and recipient subscriptions
During ordering form
You need to activate the “Group recipients” field in order to add recipients at the same time as creating the group subscription. This field is only shown if the campaign selected in the form is a group campaign.
After that, you can add recipients one by one as you fill out the form:
This is probably the easiest way to register recipients if you already have their details at the time of registration and there aren’t too many of them.
Via self-service
As group administrator, log into self-service -> select the group subscription -> click “Manage subscribers.” You can add individuals manually or import recipients—ideal for bulk registration.
Subscribers can be added individually or imported from a file. This is the easiest method if you need to register multiple recipients at once or simply add a few new recipients who should be active from the moment they are entered.
Via publisher interface
This is the most complex method, but sometimes it can be the most appropriate - e.g., when you need to adjust the start date of the recipient subscription.
You start the same way as when creating a regular subscription, but in the dialog box, click on “Create reciever under group subscription”:
You’ll then be taken to the next dialog box where you select which group subscription the recipient should be linked to:
When you click “Use” on the selected group subscription, you’ll be returned to the familiar subscription creation dialog. Here, you can choose the campaign and optionally deviate from the default settings.
IMPORTANT!: Creating multiple recipient subscriptions at once should not be done via the publisher interface, but instead by logging into self-service as the group administrator and creating them there. This is because subscriptions are invoiced as soon as they are created, so if you create them one by one, you will (in this example) end up with 10 separate invoices instead of one combined invoice. This is avoided by using the self-service interface, where subscriptions are only created once they are saved.
Daily administration & FAQs
How to tell the difference between a group subscription and a reciever subscription
In the subscriber overview, the group administrator’s account is marked with an icon showing a group of people:
In the publisher interface’s subscriber overview, the group recipient’s account is marked with an icon showing a single person:
Lifecycle
The recipient subscription fully follows the group subscription. Stopping the group subscription will automatically stop all linked recipients. Suspending the group subscription halts the delivery of publications to all recipients. Conversely, changes made to a recipient subscription do not affect anyone other than the recipient.
When a group subscription is continued, all recipients who haven't been cancelled are also continued.
A publication job assigns issues to the group subscription – not to the individual recipients. So it's only on the group subscription that you can see how many issues are owed to each recipient. Again, this is because recipients are not involved in payment. However, only recipients appear on the distribution lists for print and/or digital delivery.
It’s also possible to have recipient campaigns that are not synchronized with the group subscription. This is useful in situations where you want to offer a shorter trial subscription.
Changing campaigns
You can switch from one group campaign to another. Doing so will automatically change the campaign for all recipients to one that is valid under the new group campaign.
You can also change campaigns individually for each recipient, selecting from the campaigns allowed under the group campaign. This can be done either through self-service as the recipient (the switch takes effect immediately and requires that campaign switching is allowed for the recipient campaign) or through the publisher interface (either immediately or at the end of the current period).