You are using MailChimp for your newsletters, and Salesforce for your CRM and fundraising activities. When you synchronize MailChimp with Salesforce, by using the free app ‘MailChimp for Salesforce’, you can monitor what exactly your newsletter recipient does with your mailings: read, click or nothing. You can also manage your lists in one place. Easy, right? Or is it?

It’s not as easy and breezy in practice. I see a lot of nonprofits struggle to use the app. MailChimp is a widely used mailing-tool because it’s user friendliness, and the (relatively) low cost. But: the app for Salesforce synchronization is rather limited. Meaning: there’s a lot of importing and exporting of lists back and forth, without the ability to add existing contacts to new segments or groups. This decreases confidence in automation, which leads to people opting to work fully manually once again. Which means you’re back to square one.

So: what now? I’m often contacted with the question whether we can help optimize this process. This means I face the following dilemma. On the one hand: client friendliness and taking away worries , by adding an extra tool. Such as Cazoomi, a tool which helps Salesforce and MailChimp to synchronize better. On the other hand: the ambition to help nonprofits even further, combined with enthusiasm for a tool with countless possibilities which does synchronize properly with Salesforce: Pardot.

And it does so much more. Think of lead scoring, for instance, or customer journeys, automation rules, segmentation and completion actions. Does that sound like it might be too big of a step for now? Then it might be worth looking into valuing your donors. You could make a small program in Pardot for your major donors, so you can regularly let them know how much they mean to you. It only requires a one-time set-up, and once one of your donors meets the criteria, they are automatically included in the program. A similar program can be set up for donors who have been with your non-profit for a full year. Or to onboard volunteers and organize events. All of this and more is possible via Pardot. Set everything up once, and let Pardot do the work for you from then on.

I can hear you think: Is Pardot expensive? What will I gain from it? Logical questions. Allow me to ask one in return: How much time do you lose with manual action? How much do your multichannel campaigns cost you, annually? What do you gain from them? And how well do you know your donors?

Perhaps we could have a brainstorm about all of the above and more. You can click here to find a moment that works for you, to meet via the phone.

PS: you’re also more than free to contact me about MailChimp, of course. 🙂

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