The first thing you should know is that this review was unsolicited by MailChimp (a web-based mass emailing service). Secondly, we have been a client of MailChimp for over a year. Lastly, as an online church management software service (www.ChurchOfficeOnline.com) we have a lot of experience and expertise in web applications.
The Service
MailChimp‘s online service has seven basic features: Design, Publish, Share, Track, Manage, Integration, and Mobile connectivity. Together the features provide a robust email communication/marketing program. While business marketing is the primary client target, churches can also uses its features to vastly improve their communications to members and attendees. Effective communication is the greatest challenge and need in church management today.
For an online program to be effective I believe it must have needed features with a clean and simple user interface (U.I.). From the moment you login you will discover that MailChimp has both. It is very Ipodic in that its design is simple but the technology is solid and deep. It also has a fun personality about it with its monkey insights and feedback. As one who borders more on the serious side, I never found it to be disruptive or tasteless (I do monkey around sometimes).
Learning about MailChimp and setting up your account is easy and supported with text and short video tutorials as well as all other features. After your account is set up you can start designing an email newsletter or campaign by using the one of the many provided templates or design one yourself. The templates are a good place to start and it still provides you with flexibility you need.
With an online email program churches will appreciate the following advantages:
Web Based Mass Email Communications
From start to finish all the programs and utilities you need are provided. No longer will you need to purchase desktop based programs for each entry user.
Empowers Your Ministries
It allows you involve multiple people in the design, graphics, content and publication of the program. Do you have a missionary that sends you a newsletter? Now they can simply be given access to your MailChimp service.
Powerful Analytics
Unlike traditional church communications we seldom find out if people are getting them. With MailChimp it will report back to you how many opened the email and clicked through to other links provided. It even tells you how well you did over the last email letter you sent. Nothing can improve communication more than real-time feedback.
Integration
MailChimp also can be integrated into other online applications. This feature will upload to your MailChimp account with current email addresses of your total church or group/s within your church. Our church management software, Church Membership Online, has been fully integrated with MailChimp . Many other services from billing to online contact services have done the same.
It’s FREE!!!
Oh I almost forgot that for most churches who have less than 2000 deliverable email addresses in their database… the service is free. Yes, free. I hesitate to say that now as most are sold on it for that fact… I implore you to read on though.
Summary
When you finally finish designing your email and building your email list it has a nice feature that lets you test your email campaigns before you send them to everyone. In fact it will let you send a tested email to several people (say your communication team).
After you send your email out to everyone or a group it will track how your email campaign went with a report pie chart giving the percentage of your opens, bounced, unopened and click through rates. It also compares your results to industry benchmarks and previous campaign results. It will tell you who looked at it, and those who never want you to send them an email again.
One note of caution: this program does not take kindly to you sending emails to people who are not members/attendees/subscribers. If you get too many “Unsubscribe” or worse yet the dreaded “Abuse Complaint” you could be dropped. “Spam” is classified as unsolicited, unwanted emails sent to an email address or addresses. This program should be used to communicate to those who by default are members/attendees or requested to be added to your mailing.
I strongly recommend MailChimp for your church or non-profit. If you care about effective communication you need to consider this as a tool which will help you to that end.
Mike Smith, COO
ChurchOfficeOnline.com