Bolt Preference Centre
Written by Benji Weiser
Updated at November 15th, 2024
Table of Contents
Push notifications can be a great tool for user engagement, but even more so when tailored to what your users want to see. Currently the only one of our third party push partners that offers push customisation from a user perspective is Airship, so we have decided to create our own.
What is the Bolt Preference Centre?
The Bolt Preference Centre allows your users to pick from a list of topics, chosen by you, to let you know what they're interested in and what they want to receive notifications about.
The topics are configured by us, at your request, and will then be sent to a user's profile in your push provider dashboard as a ‘tag’ whenever users change their preferences. This will then allow you to send pushes to audiences for each specific tag. Each topic has its own tag, and multiple topics can be grouped, allowing users to turn all topics in that group on or off (group headers do not send a tag, they are purely functional).
As the preference centre is hosted by us you have control over all copy and styling on the page, including:
- The title and subtitle
- All topics and group headings
- Fonts
- Button, background and section colours
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Who can use the Preference Centre?
Currently the Bolt Preference Centre is only available for OneSignal customers (OneSignal customers will need to check what plan they're on, as you will need access to more data tags than the free plan offers). We are adding support for Pushly and Firebase soon.
To get started all we need to know is how you want your preference centre to look, adhering to the above options, and where you want to put it. We don't need any additional configuration or information.
Support for additional push providers
We do plan to expand the functionality to other providers in the coming months and will update this doc accordingly.
If you are interested in us adding support for a particular push provider, please get in touch. If it is not one of our productised providers, there may be some cost associated with this.
In order to for us to integrate it the third party in question would need to provide some form of user tagging frameworks and APIs that we can use to set said tags (i.e. not solely handled natively).
While we do support Airship's preference centre, it is separate from our Bolt Preference Centre and the two may not support the same functions.
What is needed to get the Preference Centre live?
Version requirement - Bolt iOS 4.1 / ( Unreleased - Android 4.0)
The Preference centre needs a new Bolt configuration to be added to the app. This means it can be added server-side without an app update, however if you want it to appear on first run for all users then you'll need an app update. This applies for styling updates as well.