Can we add an approval process/queue to emails sent through CiviCRM?

Question

We're a fairly large NGO that is trying to consolidate and control emails to major gift donors (VIPs). We have an accounting department and a student sponsorship department that produce different content for VIPs. We'd like all emails to be consolidated through the major gift department, who can then act as personal assistants to the VIPs.

Currently we can be reactive, viewing Activities previously sent. Our boss wants us to add our own email addresses into VIP contacts, meaning all emails will be sent into our inboxes to curate when we can, and we can forward on the emails to the VIPs.

We were hoping for a different solution, like some sort of workflow approval queue that we could check when necessary. The sponsorship team sends a bulk mail to all sponsors, but it's not sent to VIPs until we go through the list and click "yes, yes, no, yes".

We've experimented with placing "Hold" on VIPs, but it means the content from the bulk mail (with tokens and media) is never created, necessitating manual creation.

CiviMail and emails sent through CiviCRM are different; is it possible to have such a 'quality assurance' queue for both?

(as an aside, is there any way to add a large visual indicator or something to a contact's page informing database users that 'this contact is a VIP'?)

Answer 1

I'd recommend a different concept - maintain a VIP group and then exclude those group members when you're creating a group to send the mail to (use custom search "Add/Remove Group").

The reasons are: 1) No further development required! 2) If you have to approve each bulk email they receive, they may receive a lot of emails at once. It effectively bypasses any frequency control your staff are producing for the main members.