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Hi everyone, and welcome to this SwiftFox Masterclass. Today we're looking at contact restrictions, the controls that determine whether a contact can be reached at all, regardless of what else is happening in your database.

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This session isn't about every toggle and setting. Instead, we want to give you a clear mental model what these restrictions are for, how the two layers work together, and most importantly, what actually happens to a restricted person when you send an email, send a text, run a call, or head out on a door knock. Get that model right and you'll be able to trust your outreach to do the right thing without having to check it every time.

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At their core, contact restrictions are a compliance and respect mechanism. That how you honour someone's request not to be contacted, meet your obligations under the spam and privacy rules, and avoid that trust-eroding moment of reaching someone who explicitly ask you not to.

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The important thing to understand is where these controls sit. They operate above preferences and subscriptions. A contact might be on three lists and subscribe to your newsletter, but if a restriction applies, none of that matters. The restriction wins. It helps to think of it as a master register that sits over the top of everything else you do.

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When you open the Contact Restrictions tab on a profile, you'll see two distinct sections, and the relationship between them is the key idea of this session.

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The first is the overall restriction. This is your master switch with three states; no restriction, permanent or temporary. A permanent restriction is for someone who's off limits indefinitely – they've opted out, there's a legal order, the person has passed away, or the contact is simply no longer appropriate.

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When you set one, SwiftFox asks you to record a reason, and those reasons are configurable in your settings, so they reflect your organisation's real situations. This is exactly where something like marking a contact as deceased is handled. You apply a permanent restriction with a deceased reason, which keeps the person in your records for household and reporting context, while making sure they're never contacted again.

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A temporary restriction does the same job, but only for a defined window either a campaign period you've set up or a custom expiry date. The advantage is that you don't have to remember to switch it back on. When the window closes, SwiftFox reinstates the contact automatically.

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Here's the part worth pausing on the moment you set any overall restriction. It overrides the second section entirely and blocks out every channel. You'll see the per channel controls grey out with a banner confirming that all channels are blocked, so the overall restriction is deliberately blunt. It's all or nothing.

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If it's a permanent restriction. That alert is bold and red because it's the most serious action you can take on this screen.

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If it's a temporary or campaign period restriction, you'll see a softer amber warning instead. Since it's time limited and will lift on its own. Either way, the point is the same if you've set a restriction, you'll know it, and if you didn't mean to, you'll catch it before it affects anything.

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And once a restriction is in place, you'll see a badge at the top of the profile, so anyone landing on that contact can tell at a glance that they are restricted without having to open this tab to find out.

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The second layer, the channel restrictions, is where you get precise rather than blocking everything. You can switch off individual channels, direct mail calls, visits, bulk SMS campaigns, email campaigns, and your meta audience. This is useful when someone is happy to hear from you in some ways, but not others. Perhaps they'll take an email but never want a phone call. These apply globally across every circle so they behave as a genuine top level register.

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One important distinction channel restrictions apply to your bulk outreach, not your 1 to 1 messages. You can still send an individual email or text from a profile when there's a legitimate reason to. Temporary restrictions lean on a concept worth understanding in its own right: campaign periods.

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You define these in your settings, giving each one a name, a category, and a start and end date. They exist for those concentrated windows, an election campaign, a major membership drive, a fundraising push – where you want to pause outreach to people who you've already converted so you're not spending budget or goodwill on someone who's already said yes.

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You can also assign a campaign period to specific circles. It's worth being clear about what that does. Assigning circles controls who can apply that period, not the reach of the block itself. Once a campaign period restriction is applied to a contact, the contact is restricted globally for its duration, regardless of circle.

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What actually happens across your tools? This is the question that matters most in practice, so let's be precise about it. For your bulk communications, email campaigns, SMS campaigns, and call lists, a restricted contact is removed from the send.

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They won't appear in the recipients and they won't be contacted. The behaviour to be aware of is that SwiftFox does this silently. There's no prominent alert telling you someone was excluded. So if you build a list of, say, 200 people and your campaign reports 198 sent, that gap is almost certainly your restrictions working as intended rather than an error. It's good practice to expect that not to be surprised by it.

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Visits work exactly the same way, and it's worth being clear about this because it's the area most people assume is an exception. It isn't. Take the case that seems most likely to slip through. Two people share an address and only one of them is restricted. Your canvasser sees the contactable resident and the option to record someone else.

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So in plain terms, contact restrictions are your master control for whether a contact can be reached sitting above every preference and subscription in your database.

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Use the overall restriction when someone is off limits completely, whether permanently or just for a season, and use the channel restrictions when you need to switch off contact one route at a time.

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If you're putting this into practice, a good starting point is to agree on your restriction reasons so your team records them consistently, and to trust that your campaigns and visits will quietly respect these rules for you. Thanks for joining this SwiftFox masterclass and we'll see you in the next one.