Several of our clients have asked us about creating an integration between TouchPoint and Mail Chimp , and now we've done it! The reason behind this is to allow you to very easily create beautiful newsletters using Mail Chimp's templates and still send to a targeted list created in TouchPoint. This is not intended to be used for your everyday emails, but just for those special weekly or monthly newsletters or a one-off special announcement email.

One reason you would not use Mail Chimp for all email is that once you leave TouchPoint and your email is in Mail Chimp you lose the ability to include Email Replacement Codes such as Register Links, Vote Links, and more. Also, you cannot track these emails inside TouchPoint, and you do not want to lose the ability to look at a person's record and see which emails he has been sent.

That said, we think this integration will be a very valuable tool when used for its original purpose - newsletters.

In order to use this, your church must create an account in Mail Chimp , add 2 SQL scripts and 1 Python script to your database, and create an organization(s) to use as your mailing list(s) . We have step-by-step instructions to guide you through the process of setting up this feature, including the SQL and Python scripts in recipe-form for you to copy and paste into your database. Check it out if you are interested!

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PS Did you notice that we used Mail Chimp for our January Newsletter?