The Subject line really says it all here: I have 5 (of 6) consortium orgs currently using WordFly, but one of them wants to switch to MailChimp. If anyone has any "Whatever you do, make sure you ___" or "no matter what, don't do ___" stories, I'd love to hear them. Thanks!
Tell them no and smack them with a rolled-up newspaper.All kidding aside. Will they be forking out for Monkey Wrench? If not, then Mail Chimp doesn't really integrate with Tessitura. We haven't been able to afford Monkey Wrench. So there have been challenges. Atlanta Ballet has had MailChimp for a while now. We have come up with systems and overall we're fine now, but alas the system is not perfect. sigh.Atlanta Ballet uses Mail Chimp and our Marketing team is mostly happy with it. Seems like a fine mail platform. The person who pulls most of the lists and extractions isn't quite as fond. Every list has to be exported out of Tess and uploaded to Mail Chimp. It is annoying that they don't talk to each other.I'm not sure how freely your consortium shares information across organizations, but TATL does not share emails. ALL emails are control-grouped to the organization. We also use contact point purposes and have a special salutation for emails. It presents some challenges.And I'm not even the person who pulls the lists for Mail Chimp. The better person to speak to would be Lindsay Smith, Assoc Dir of Patron Services, lsmith@atlantaballet.com. Send her a message. She's always happy to help a fellow Tessiturian.
Our only marketing integration for our consortium at the moment is with WordFly, and under half of our member organizations use it. We have an organization or two on MailChimp, but they haven't been interested in exploring Monkey Wrench (primarily for the reasons Dana Hylton Calabro mentions) since you're basically paying a bunch more to make it work versus using something like WordFly that has an integration ready to go.We've had some discussion in the past about potentially encouraging (but not quite mandating) that member organizations use a specific vendor for some of these integrations and tools, but nothing concrete yet. My primary motivation behind this is that with these third-party tools, often our consortium staff members are not experienced with them and in many cases, we don't even have our own logins to the tools to do hands-on troubleshooting. Each scenario is different, of course, but I feel like our ideal future would be to reach a point where there's a basic understanding that the support provided by consortium staff will be more consistent and of higher quality, if everyone uses a single tool that we can all get comfortable with versus having it be a hodgepodge of vendors.
Brian, I can always count on you to articulate my position far better than I could I definitely have concerns about my ability to support this, even at a basic level.
That said, Vendor Hodgepodge would make a great band name.