Migrate off mailchimp

[XertroV]

Mailchimp costs us $100/Mo atm

Could migrate to send grid - would be like $20/Mo instead

Todos

• update back end to push new users to send grid
• migrate existing users to send grid via one-time export

Issues

• partition users into states
• tracking volunteer status

Other ideas:

• use mail gun instead of send grid and do emails via back end - allows for better searching / partitioning of users but uses transactional email instead of a list - this does allow us to send private details en masse though

[XertroV]

Email to current mailchimp users:

Hey all,

You're receiving this because you've currently got access to the mailchimp account.

Mailchimp is reasonably expensive (costing us $100/mo+) and there's a competitor (SendGrid) that would cost us more like $20 a month. It's been an intention to move off mailchimp for a while, so I'm going to be working on this in the near future. You'll all be invited to sendgrid as I set it up with equivalent permissions.

I'll post updates here.

The items needed to confirm the move are:

• backend integration
  -- pushing members to mailing lists
  -- transactional email (per user)
• The auto-join email + templates (@tom can I get your help setting this and templates up?)
• setup of groups (states/volunteers)

And I think that's it - if anyone has any other items they think are important please let me know. Otherwise will update as I go.

Cheers
Max

[TomSesselmann]

Yep I can hell with the templates. But I need access first.

The other feature that would be good is to give certain people access to just WA members for example. Is that possible?

[JoCotterill]

I think this is great, ideally it would be great to separate the members in a number of ways:

• State Membership
• Volunteer Status (and sub-categorising by interest area)
• Candidates
• Electoral areas would be also awesome so that we can send out information specific to their candidates.

I would love to be able to help but I am not really a programmer although I have worked with and created membership databases in the past....

I agree that moving away from MailChimp to SendGrid makes sense. Do we have to run members past it however or do we can just do it? Perhaps we could just check to note who had unsubscribed from Mail Chimp first as we send this over....

[XertroV]

@JoCotterill

Whoops didn't see your comment till just now

That sort of control is the idea but I don't think MailChimp or sendgrid have that feature; we can integrate with their API though and provide access through the admin app

[XertroV]

Oh and we can just do it. Rather than reimporting the member DB we'd just export all MailChimp emails and import to sendgrid