The best email marketing option for a small nonprofit
January 07, 2020
The best email marketing option for a small nonprofit
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Premium
Overall Satisfaction with Mailchimp
We use Mailchimp to communicate with the public via email. They sign up on our website or at an event (they have to opt in), and then we send marketing/fundraising emails about two to four times per month. It's a great way to keep people engaged and send them info that they wouldn't otherwise come across. Since our supporters span a huge age range and a region of 26 counties, it's important that we have a fast way to communicate with them. Only one person at our organization handles the Mailchimp emails for the entire org.
- Great quality for the price. I appreciate the nonprofit discount.
- The interface is pretty easy to use and visually appealing.
- Their "audience" and "segments" functions could use some tweaking. It doesn't totally make sense to me, even though I'm an experienced email marketer.
- Their templates are pretty limiting. You only have a few options for number of columns, and once you pick one while editing an email, you can't switch or add more.
- The last fundraising email I sent a few days before New Year's brought in about $2,000!
- I don't calculate our ROI because that's kind of impossible with a nonprofit like ours.
Mailchimp is vastly easier to use, both with editing emails and uploading/processing subscribers. It's been a few years since I've used Salesforce though, so I hope they improved it. Mailchimp is also much cheaper. I think the org I used to work for that used Salesforce switched to Emma.
We integrate Mailchimp with our donor database, Little Green Light. There were some hiccups at first with getting the data transferred properly when people were signing up for our e-news through our LGL donation form (it was an LGL issue), but we got them sorted out and now it works well. I love that I can see which donors are subscribed. I wish LGL could pull data on which emails they've opened, so I don't have to do all those extra steps.
I've learned how to work with the software quirks, like building segments and limited email format restrictions (especially columns) to make emails that look really nice. We are continually tweaking our designs to capitalize on what Mailchimp does well, and testing different ways to maximize donations from our subscribers and turn them from fans into donors.