It is finally here – Chimpegration. Integration between The Raiser’s Edge and MailChimp. With our free customisation you can export your email addresses directly from The Raiser’s Edge into your MailChimp lists, populating your merge variables in one automated process. Raiser’s Edge users have always been used to creating Word mail merges so that they can create sophisticated merge documents. Now they can do the same with email. Once the email campaign has been sent you can manage any bounces or unsubscribes directly from The Raiser’s Edge. Not only that, you can also add an action, appeal or attribute to any constituent with an email that was sent the campaign.
All that for free!
If you want more then we also offer a (paid for) Professional version appropriately called “Chimpegration Professional”. This allows you to synchronise activity between the two systems. This means that you can make use of MailChimp’s own forms to allow you users to update their own information. It then feeds back into The Raiser’s Edge. Equally any information you update in RE will feed back into MailChimp. Don’t worry, the review screen gives you complete control over which information is moved where. Also with this version you are able to see each constituent’s activity directly from the constituent record. See when they were sent the email, when they opened it and what they clicked on.
I was very pleased to have won a MailChimp integration fund award to integrate The Raiser’s Edge with MailChimp. It is such a great product and the possibilities for integration were enormous. The Raiser’s Edge manages donors really well but it never really made it into the world of email marketing. Of course there is integration with Outlook but that is not good enough when you need to send out thousands of newsletters. NetMail was a good start but their template design functionality was so limited. NetCommunity was better still but even with that product there are too many compromises (and it costs too). There are a lot of different email marketing applications out there but I have been using MailChimp for a while myself as part of my website newsletter. It has great functionality but I would never have used it if it had not been for two things; it is free for smaller volume users and it has a great API. Things could have been so different. Before looking at MailChimp I applied to get a developer licence at ConstantContact. I had to fill out a form and justify my use of it. I did that but they never even got back to me.
Chimpegration – Free
MailChimp – Free
Email marketing – now Free!