Setting Up the Mailchimp Integration

Use Mailchimp to send bulk emails to all of your donors.

---

Overview

The sync between Kindful and Mailchimp is bidirectional.

This means when you connect an Audience from Mailchimp, the contacts from that Audience will copy into Kindful.

The same is not true from Kindful to Mailchimp. When you initially connect, your Kindful contacts are not copied into Mailchimp. This is to keep you from being forced into a new pricing level with Mailchimp.

This means that you'll need to do two things to establish a seamless two-way sync between Kindful and Mailchimp, which this article goes into depth about:

1. Mailchimp to Kindful:  Connect your Mailchimp account in your app settings. 
2. Kindful to Mailchimp:  Create a Kindful Group that contains all your contacts.

Once both of the above are accomplished, contacts will flow between Kindful and the connected Mailchimp Audience, whether they are in a group or not. 

Linked Articles:

- Mailchimp: Overview

- VIDEO: Connecting Mailchimp

- Add a Kindful Group to Mailchimp

- Mailchimp Troubleshooting

- Mailchimp FAQs

---

1. Mailchimp -> Kindful

1. The integration will only work when it is connected by an Owner or Admin of Mailchimp, and the connected user stays at that access level.
2. Make sure identify which an Audience in Mailchimp you'd like to connect. 
3. Add at least 1 contact to that Audience.
4. Open Apps in Kindful.
5. Scroll down to Mailchimp, click on App Settings.

Once you have your Mailchimp App Settings open in Kindful, you’ll need to map your Audience, which is what will help the data you have in your Mailchimp fields, be populated in the correct field in Kindful. The email field is automatically mapped so this will not show up on the mapping page.

Looking at the Mailchimp App Settings from your App Directory in Kindful, you’ll click Edit Configuration.

 

Choose Manage.

Select the appropriate boxes to Update Mapping, setting that Mailchimp Audience as Default.

When the Audience has been mapped, you have finished establishing the sync from Mailchimp to Kindful.  

Of Note: Kindful will only sync a mailing address to/from the Kindful address fields to the Mailchimp address fields. We do not support syncing a Kindful mailing address field to a Mailchimp custom text field for address.

---

2. Kindful -> Mailchimp

To establish the Kindful to Mailchimp sync, go to your Contacts page in Kindful, and put all your contacts into a Kindful Group.  You can see how to create groups here.

The groups you make in Kindful will push into Mailchimp as tags within your Audience.

Once you've done both of these steps, all of your contacts with a valid email address will flow back and forth between Kindful and Mailchimp, whether they are in a group or not.

If you have existing groups you'd like to be synced to Mailchimp once it is connected in the App Directory, just recreate these groups to kick off the sync.

Here is an image of what you will see in Mailchimp. Kindful Groups will be syncing in as Tags.

Here is some great information on Mailchimp's tags

Tags you’ve added to contacts display on the overall Audience view.

---

 

OTHER SYNC OPTIONS

 

---

Populating an empty Mailchimp Audience with Kindful contacts

If your goal is to fill a new, empty Mailchimp account with your contacts in Kindful, here are the steps:

1. Create an Audience in Mailchimp.
2. Add 1 contact to that Audience.
3. Open Apps in Kindful.
4. Scroll down to Mailchimp, click on App Settings.

Make sure to map your Mailchimp fields in Kindful, and then create your Groups. Any Groups you create in Kindful will sync into Mailchimp as a tag within yourAudience. 

This option can be particularly useful if you do not want to bring all of your Mailchimp contacts into Kindful. 

---

Push contacts only from Kindful to Mailchimp

There’s one more option to control how your contacts sync. This should only be used if you want to send contacts from Kindful to Mailchimp, but not from Mailchimp to Kindful.

First, make a unique Mailchimp Audience specifically for Kindful to sync with. This way, as you create a contact group in Kindful, it will sync as a Tag to Mailchimp, housed within the syncing Audience.

As long as you don't add contacts to Mailchimp directly (e.g. via a signup form) then it should be a one-way sync, and you shouldn’t have any unexpected contacts coming in through Mailchimp.