CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We are a small organisation that moved to Civi about a year ago. It is an excellent system for managing our members. However, we much prefer the useabilty and enhanced funcionality of the newsletter system Mailchimp. We would definately like to see some ability to intergrate the use of the 2 systems. As a small organisation we could not hope to fund the initiave but i did notice this very interesting article on mailchimp

http://www.mailchimp.com/about/integration-fund

Whereby Mailchimp will pay money to enable the easy untegration bewteen there system and others. This appears to me to be perfect. Is this something Civi would like to pursue itself or is the only approach for us to identify an integration we would like and then for us to request funding from Mailchimp? If it did need us to request funding would anybody be able ti indicate what the cost may be.

Thanks a lot and keep up the good work

My organization would be interested in this too.  Mailchimp's integration fund sounds likes a great way to leverage some private sector investment to improve open-source software. How do we make this happen? It seems like the request would need to come from the civi team. 

Hey guys!!

Not sure if Civi Team has sent in a request to MailChimp. But being an expert on MailChimp list and CiviCRM professional services company; we sent an email yesterday lets see what comes back.

Will keep you posted.

Nope nothing yet.

Any progress on this?

I've used civimail and mailchimp and it's not a question of civimail not being able to do things, but mailchimp being able to do them better and faster.  Mailchimp is funding integration with other CRMs so why not civi? 

I've used a few different email marketing services over the years and Mailchimp is by far the most innovative and the easiest to use.  In terms of what's better, here's a shortlist:
-intuitive user interface and help features
-faster sending and with more options (they've got a feature called time warp for optimizing open rates across time zones)
-professionally designed templates (for newsletters, events, etc) and easy to use editing tools for those who want to create from scratch
-campaign reporting (easy to see how a campaign is going)
-list reporting (easy to see the health of my list on one screen)
-social pro add-on service allows me to see which of my subscribers are using what social networks and do targeted mailings to list members on twitter, facebook, etc
-integrates with almost everything (except civicrm!) so that, for example, I can very easily add a subscription form to my org's facebook page
-and here's the best part: it's free for most small nonprofits (ie. those with lists of 2000 members or under). They offer a nonprofit discount for groups which don't qualify for the free service. 

I could go on and on, but this is a good start. 

arielqgold seems to have a project on drupal.org that does this. (I would post a link, but it seems I am restricted from posting external links)

Is anyone aware of this project?