Recording MailChimp Emails

Jessica Moore

Our Comms Director uses MailChimp to connect with our volunteer and donor base instead of using the communications inside eTapestry. My Executive Director would like profiles to reflect when someone has been sent an email. I believe they used an integration system in the past without much luck. Does anyone have any best practices for somehow making this work? I'm thinking it will have to be a mass update but just not sure if that means I would have to import a list? Or if there is another way I'm not thinking of.


Thank you!!

Faith Murray

Jessica Moore‍, we have a similar situation at our org, between MC and Raiser's Edge. What complicates this is that MC uses the email address as the unique identifier rather than a constituent ID. In order to update into RE (or eTapestry), you would need to export the email list data from MC and then match it to your donor emails every time you need to do an update, before being able to import.


What we did was we added a hidden merge field into MC, where we were able to upload our Raiser's Edge constituent ID. This means we only need to do an email match once for identified constituents, and it makes imports or bulk adds much easier.

Jessica Moore

Faith! That was the answer I was scared of! Do you have any best practices for the process or what worked/didn't work? What was the import process like? I know you're on RE but just curious if it is time consuming/difficult.

Faith Murray

Well, it is not any more difficult than any other import, except for the fact that emails tend to be sent out much more frequently, and so this would likely become a weekly/monthly thing. You would export the MC file (with database IDs already matched in the merge fields), then create a list ("query" in RE) of eTap IDs, and use that for your import/bulk add. With that query, in Raiser's Edge you can actually upload the info three ways: obviously, import -- but then also Bulk Add and there is even an option to add appeal info to a donor record through the mail processing tabs. I don't know how that translates into eTapestry.


Probably the hardest part of the process is matching the emails in the first place, that first time you are adding IDs to MC. To do this, you would:

• export all Mailchimp emails into csv/excel
• export all eTapestry email addresses with IDs into csv/excel
• paste the MC emails into a column in the eTap excel file
• match the columns, sort, and eliminate all non-duplicates
• use the resulting list to re-upload the file, with IDs into MC.

For matching, I love the Excel formula =if(iserror(match(A1, $B$2:$B$5000, 0)), "match", "no match") but you can also find a great tutorial for conditional formatting the column pairs at https://trumpexcel.com/compare-two-columns/ (which, disclaimer, I haven't tried yet).


The last factor I would say is that you need to have a policy in place for how you are going to handle any new Mailchimp subscribers who may not exist in eTap and may not have addresses. For example, will you put them in eTap, or let them live entirely in MC as their own non-donor list?


Just some thoughts. I'd be happy to help if you want with the excel matching process.

Greg Simmons

Sidekick Solutions has a MailChimp integration for eTapestry - this is a great blog that discusses the alternative approaches https://www.sidekicksolutionsllc.com/etapestry/blog/mailchimp-integration-email-marketing-for-etapestry-crm

Karen Tuecke

Good morning Jessica,


A couple of questions...


1. Do you have all the emails updated in eTap?

2. Do you have these segmented the same as you do in MailChimp or by chance do you use a UDF or a mailing status to define these particular people you are sending messages to?

3. If all the above, develop a simple email query and mass update.

4. If not, maybe importing the emails and defining a field for segmentation then mass update.


Just my recommendations.


-Karen