Best practices for automating "letters" of reference for student applicants

[Heidi1]

Need help automating the referral part of the application process for students. The goal is to have the applicant fill out our HubSpot application form, to include three references and that the references would receive a reference form to fill out and then once that form was completed that the information would be included in the applicant's record.

Here's what's been done so far:

• Registration form for the student applicants that includes custom property fields for three references. What I did was to create custom properties for the referer's first name, last name, email address in hopes we could include those custom properties in the contact record of the applicant without overwriting the applicant's HubSpot Contact Record
• Need confirmation that we could simply setup an automation for the forms to be sent to the three referers
• Need help automating the responses to the referer forms being added to the applicant's HubSpt Contact Record.

Was told by HubSpot rep to see if anyone had 

[MFrankJohnson · Accepted solution]

HubSpot has no native built-in ability to send emails to 'referrees' -- defined, in this case, as email addresses stored in a property other than the HubSpot contact.email property.

You might use the HubSpot Single Send API to send TRANSACTIONAL email to alternate ('referree') email addresses -- thereby creating new contacts in the CRM. However, lacking explicit permission from the intended recipients, this is not a best practice and may violate the HubSpot Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).

[Heidi1]

Frank, 

Thank you for the information about the option to use the "single send API" to send the "transactional" email. And for a reminder to double-check that the applicant confirms that the "referees" have given permission to have their email address shared.

Kindly,

Heidi

[MFrankJohnson]

You're welcome Heidi. Not to belabor the point, but the onus to obtain 'permission to send' rests with the SENDER (us), not any 3rd-party -- e.g., 'referrer'.

Only the intended recipient can grant permission for us to send to them. This is a fine point, but non-trivial should we ever need to prove that we've properly obtained permission to send.