MailChimp has many pre-designed templates for newsletters. We’re always adding more, too. A handful of these templates are designed specifically for nonprofit organizations, but most aren’t.

Here’s the thing, though: Nonprofits can totally use the templates that aren’t specifically designated for nonprofits.

This isn’t exactly news. But maybe your micromanager needed to hear it from someone else. At the very least, the next time some know-it-all suggests that you “run your nonprofit more like a business,” you can say that you use the same newsletter templates that businesses use. (Maybe this happens just before you issue a swift kick to said know-it-all’s shin.)

I’ve highlighted some templates that nonprofit organizations might like to use or edit to fit their brand guidelines. Let’s take a look at them, knowing that—yes—there are more, and—yes—you can always design your own from scratch.

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Many organizations use Google Apps for email, calendars, and shared documents. Google Apps streamlines collaboration and gives users the opportunity to use Gmail from their own domains. For some nonprofits, this service is free. For very large organizations, Google offers a significant discount on their normal business plan.

The folks at Wishery have developed a gadget that makes it easy for authorized users to update your MailChimp list from within Gmail. Like, one-minute-video easy.

With Wishery Basic and a few clicks, you can add, remove, and edit MailChimp subscribers from within Gmail. It’s free and really helpful.

Wishery Pro isn’t quite as free, but it’s even more helpful. You have the ability to see, add to, and edit the extra fields and groups that you’ve already set up in your MailChimp list. These improvements are pretty critical if you have a segmented list or an audience with varied interests.

If you’ve recently corresponded with some of your snootiest donors who only want to hear about your upcoming black-tie fundraiser, Wishery Pro can help you separate them from the riffraff with just a few clicks. You can even use Wishery and MailChimp to update your donors’ latest gifts and manage volunteers within Gmail.

Wishery Basic might be just what your small organization needs to save some time and hassle. Or Wishery Pro may be a real boon for your organization’s harried marketing team. If you’re not sure what you need, there’s a 14-day trial to help you figure out the best option for your organization.

As much as I’d like for your donors to think day and night about your organization’s recent cash-flow issues, the truth is they probably need to be reminded. This should be easy since you’ve been busy putting fantastic content online. But you might not be reaching the people who are busy signing over checks, unaware of your every move. RSS-to-email makes it easy for busy people to read your content right in their inbox.

RSS-to-email is especially helpful for organizations with constituents who might not care to know what RSS is. (Note: that’s pretty much all organizations.) RSS is the short way of saying “Really Simple Syndication,” an online format that standardizes your published content, most commonly a blog or a site with frequent updates. You can think of RSS almost like FM or AM on a radio: it’s a way of grouping diverse content in a harmonious format.
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Keeping up with donors and volunteers is complicated, especially once you decide to look for answers beyond a shoebox full of notecards or your development director who tends to withhold helpful information. There’s a menu of seemingly infinite software options for constituent relationship management, and each system has very specific pros and cons. And often only after signing a contract and rolling up your sleeves do you find out many of the cons.

We’re trying to make managing your database easier. Through our $1 million integration fund, developers can apply with an idea and get paid to build integrations between MailChimp and other web services that nonprofits already use. We’re always adding more constituent relationship management applications to our integrations directory, like CiviCRM.

CiviCRM is a unique database solution because it’s free, open source, and coordinated by a 501(c)(3) organization. Read More

Meet Lain. We hired him to teach nonprofits how to use MailChimp, and to help make using MailChimp a better experience for nonprofits. And as the former executive director of a local nonprofit, he knows what’s up. -Ben

Merge Tags can look scary to the uninitiated, but these little guys are the secret to any handsomely tailored nonprofit newsletter. They allow you to personalize emails to donors, volunteers, and fans of your organization. For instance, you might want to address donors by name or highlight different calls to action for different audiences. Merge tags make this flexibility possible.

You and I know that fundraising appeals are more successful the more personal they are. If you’d like to send out an appeal for your latest fundraising campaign, it might be helpful to address your donors by name.

All you have to do is stick the following merge tag where their name would normally appear:

(Make those vertical bars by typing shift and backslash at the same time.)

The merge tag — the part between *| and |* — will tell MailChimp to retrieve their first name and stick it right in your campaign, personalized for each email address. If you’re skeptical this will work (like I would be), just click “Popup Preview” within the campaign builder.

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