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

Pinpoint Social aims to ‘take the most powerful social strategies and make them easily accessible to businesses of all shapes and sizes.’ They provide a powerful tool for creating, delivering and tracking promotions and special offers to help drive ‘likes’ or engagement on Facebook. Using Pinpoint Social’s application you can create a promotional tab on your business page that provides an incentive for your audience to like your page.

Social promotions like these are a good way to increase the number of fans you have and thus the number of people who are getting your status updates in their news feed. Typically there’s one small problem with these kinds of promotions. When you’re on Facebook encouraging people to like you on Facebook, generally you’re only reaching the people who already like you on Facebook. Ideally you need to reach an audience that doesn’t know you’re on Facebook if you really want to grow your fan base.

That’s where Pinpoint Social’s new MailChimp integration comes in. Using their integration you can, in one click, create an email campaign from the promotion you’ve already made in Pinpoint Social and have it automatically waiting for you in the My Templates section of your MailChimp account. Then, all you have to do is log in to your MailChimp account and send the newsletter to your subscribers to let them know about the new promotion.

This is a really effective tool for building your network of fans and followers. But, then what do you do with that audience once you’ve got it? Just like with your email subscribers, your Facebook fans are more likely to share your content if you’re consistently engaging them in conversation, giving them useful information, and rewarding them for their loyalty. In my opinion, this is where a tool like Pinpoint Social really gets useful.

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Two quick announcements about AlterEgo, our free two-factor security app that protects your MailChimp account even if your password’s been stolen:

1. We recently announced a 2% discount for any MailChimp user that activates AlterEgo. Think of this as sort of a “good driver discount” you’d get from your insurance company. We’d like to reward people for being good, security-conscious netizens, because we benefit from it too. Details about the discount are posted here.
2. Brian Getting of Terra-Firma Design has created a Ruby Gem for AlterEgo. For those who don’t know, AlterEgo has an API that allows developers to add 2-factor security to their own web apps. Thanks again, Brian! (Terra-Firma also built this Shopify integration for MailChimp users)

If 2-factor authentication’s not for you, here are some other security features built in to MailChimp that you should activate.

A few years ago MailChimp decided to take video seriously. Well, in the beginning, the videos themselves were never very serious, in fact, quite the opposite. But they have always served a very serious purpose, which is to help our customers learn how to use MailChimp, learn about new features and learn about our awesome customers.

But how do we know if these videos are doing their job? I get asked that a lot. Well, it’s all about the stats.

Graph of viewership, spiking the day we emailed the Wavelength video.

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For those of you familiar with Soccer (or Fútbol for the rest of the world), there are few things as satisfying as hearing this: Goooooooooooal! (source: YouTube). It means we scored. Something good happened! Well, we want you to feel the same when you send an email and your subscribers show that they’re interested in your stuff. Today, we introduce to you Goooal, a new app from MailChimp Labs.

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