Email marketing is an incredibly effective tool for keeping your donors and supporters informed about all the great work you are doing, and how their contributions have made that possible. But it can be a challenge to manage contacts in both your donor management system and an email marketing system, especially if it means importing and exporting data between both systems on a regular basis.

This is why, back in August, we rolled out a two-way integration with MailChimp that lets you manage your email marketing lists from within LGL, and keep both sets of contacts automatically in sync. After a simple setup/configuration within MailChimp and LGL, you can begin syncing information from your LGL account to MailChimp.

Synchronization between MailChimp and LGL is a two-way process, allowing you to add and remove constituents from your MailChimp mailing lists, and automatically receive updates when constituents unsubscribe or have their email bounce (if the email address is no longer valid).

Once you have it all set up, the process looks something like this:

The full integration guide is available if you want to see all the details, and rest assured that setting the whole thing up is really quite easy. Before you know it, you can be off and running with a fully integrated email marketing service. To quote one of our customers who recently went through this process:

“Twelve minutes from having no Mailchimp acount to having one integrated with LGL complete with webhooks and I’m ready to start email campaigns. Twelve. Seriously, that was awesome. And the help document rocked.”

– Jan Nedelka, Our House for Girls (Dover, NH)

Note: MailChimp is not affiliated with LGL in any way. The MailChimp service is completely separate and carries its own pricing structure, terms of service, and privacy policy. Please see http://www.mailchimp.com/ for details.

Also note: You must have a paying subscription to LGL (not using a Trial account) and be an administrator to use this feature in LGL. If you are not an admin, you will not see any of these features.

As mentioned earlier, our integration with Wufoo Forms is quite a time saver. Today, we’ll take a look at how you can set up Wufoo and LGL to collect volunteer hours online, and have them automatically saved into your LGL database.

Step 1: Build your form in Wufoo

Assuming that you already have a Wufoo account, you can set up your form like this:

If you don’t have a Wufoo account, or if you have questions about how the integration works in general, see our full Wufoo Integration Guide for more information.

Step 2: Connect the form to LGL

From the Settings > Integration Settings page, you can add new Wufoo forms. In this case, we’ll select the “Volunteer Hours” form:

To ensure that all the data is transferred appropriately, we can map the fields from the form, like so:

As a final part of the setup, we want to “Enable” the connection between Wufoo and LGL for this form. To do this, we check off the “Enabled” checkbox, and then set the Queue to “Volunteering”.

Step 3: Review the volunteering queue

With all of this set up, now we can start collecting information from our volunteers. They can do this online at any time, and you can either embed the form in your website or point them to a version hosted by Wufoo. Once the submissions start rolling in, you will want to review and approve them individually.

To get to the volunteering queue, first click on the Activity tab and then on the Volunteering option, from which point you can select the Volunteering queue view from the View: menu:

If there is no match found for the constituent based on the record matching preferences you’ve defined (name and email by default), it is a good practice to manually look for and set the constituent for each record. To set the constituent, click on the icon next to the LGL Constituent field, search for the constituent by name, and select the matching constituent record you want to use for this record, as appropriate:

Once you have set the constituent, you can save the record by clicking the Save button, and the volunteering hours will be automatically posted to the constituent’s record:

Or, if you don’t want to save the volunteering submission because it is not valid or for some other reason, you can click the Reject button to remove it from the active queue.

Our recent integration with Wufoo’s HTML Forms means that you can now collect information from your constituents online and have it automatically entered into your LGL database. Common examples include:

• Donation forms: Collect donation details and payments from your constituents online. These donations can be set up to automatically create gifts entries in LGL.
• Event forms: Collect RSVP, additional guest, and payment information for any event.
• Volunteering forms: Collect information about volunteer interests and/or participation.
• e-Newsletter signup forms: Particularly useful when working with our MailChimp integration (http://assets.littlegreenlight.com/docs/LGLMailChimp.pdf).

Wufoo strives to be the “easiest way to collect information over the internet.” Forms can be hosted by Wufoo or deployed somewhere else (for instance, on your website). Our flexible and powerful form-mapping tool allows you to take almost any form submission from Wufoo and put it in the right spot in LGL.

To get a full picture of how the integration works, check out our integration guide:

http://assets.littlegreenlight.com/docs/LGLWufooIntegration.pdf

Note: Wufoo is not affiliated with LGL in any way. The Wufoo service is completely separate and carries its own pricing structure, terms of service, and privacy policy. Please see http://www.wufoo.com for details.

Also note: Wufoo has great discounted pricing for non-profits: https://master.wufoo.com/forms/z7p7a1/.