How to Use the Consent Question Type

What Is the Consent Question Type?

Alongside the standard question types, Shout has a purpose-built Consent question for capturing GDPR-style consent — such as a marketing opt-in — and recording it directly against the respondent’s contact record. It’s a different tool from the Multi-Choice “Agree / Do Not Agree” approach described in How to Create a Consent Form:

• Use the Consent question type when you want a respondent’s answer to update their contact record’s consent status (e.g. for marketing or data-processing consent).
• Use a Multi-Choice (Single Select) question with Logic when you need to disqualify respondents or branch them to different pages based on whether they consent — closer to a traditional informed-consent gate for a research survey.

How to Add a Consent Question

1. Open your form’s Build tab
2. Click + Question
3. Under the Special category, choose Consent

The question is added with default text of “Your consent to data processing.” — edit this like any other question.

Linking Consent Groups

A new Consent question won’t display anything to respondents until it’s linked to at least one consent group — the same groups your account uses to record GDPR/marketing consent on contacts.

1. On the Consent question, click Manage consent groups (under “Linked consent groups”)
2. This opens Settings → Contact Saving, where a Groups drop-down lists your account’s consent groups — for example “Form Sign-Ups (Legitimate interests)” or “Marketing (Explicit consent)”
3. Select the group(s) you want this question to cover

Each linked group renders as its own checkbox on the form, labelled with the group’s name and its pre-configured opt-in text (for example, the “Marketing” group shows “I agree to receive marketing communications, including updates, promotions, and newsletters.”).

Note

The same Groups selector in Settings → Contact Saving also controls which consent groups any contact saved from this form is enrolled into — linking a group to a Consent question and enabling contact saving for that group are the same setting.

Tip

At the time of writing, expanding a Consent question’s own Logic panel did not reliably display configurable rules. If you need to route or disqualify respondents based on their answer, use a Multi-Choice (Single Select) question instead — see How to Create a Consent Form.