While the communications plan option that Populi has available is very useful, having the emails limited to text-only is very problematic. Most schools use rich html-based emails to contact prospective students, applicants, etc. but there is no way to do this through Populi. A simple solution would be to allow integration with a html-email client such as MailChimp so that institutions that are already using these clients can continue to do so without the hassle of trying to figure out how to add Populi email addresses to MailChimp. In our case, integration would be better than Populi creating its own html editor--we already have all of the emails designed in another email management system; if Populi creates its own HTML editor, we will have to set up an entirely new system which is extremely time consuming.
35 comments
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Matt Jepsen Official comment While we do not currently integrate directly with MailChimp, for those of you using Zapier, we just published a short guide to help you set up an integration between Populi and MailChimp using Zapier as a webhook listener. You could use something like this to keep your contacts in MailChimp up-to-date whenever a person's information changed in Populi.
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Deborah Forteza We also use MailChimp, so this feature would benefit us, too.
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Ben Coumerilh We do too. That would be awesome! -
Joe Farage It would be even better if the integration allowed exporting email lists from Populi into Mailchimp, if that's possible at all.
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Wendy Berryhill We use Mail Chimp as well. Would love better integration!
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Joshua Chalmers We would love this!!!!
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Joshua Chalmers Also, does anyone who uses Mail Chimp have an automated way to keep your email lists in sync between Populi and Mail Chimp?
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Leo Postovoit The tools under-the-hood are there; it's a matter of deciding a few key concepts.
For example, Would it be a newsletter for current students/staff/etc. or for prospective students? (Newsletter vs. Lead-generating tool?) How would you handle unsubscribes? etc.
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Joshua Walker Ditto to the request for MailChimp integration!
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Jennifer Cake Yes this would be great. Our text-only emails are so boring and with no colors, customization, buttons, etc. like other schools have.
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Adam Sentz @Jennifer - Just FYI, while Populi doesn't have HTML email authoring tools, you can use a third-party authoring tool to create the message, and then copy/paste the code into the source view of Populi email compose editor.
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Nate Harmon Adam,
I have tried this, and Populi doesn't seem to play nice with the HTML from Mail Chimp. It seems we always have margin issues and sizing issues. Any suggestions?
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Adam Sentz @Nate - We'd need to take a look some examples and see if maybe we're scrubbing something that's causing that.
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Bryce Johnson Does anyone know if this is still in progress and has anyone found a way to sync mailing lists between Populi and MailChimp another way? Thanks family!
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Nate Harmon @Adam All you would have to do is copy code from Mail chimp into a populi email template and look what it does.
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Alainya Pierce We also use Mail Chimp and would like to sync it with populi. How do we find out if these service request have been completed?
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Adam Sentz @Alainya - Feature requests are usually marked Planned if we are working on them or have committed to implementing them at some point. Completed feature requests are usually marked Completed. On occasion we fail to keep those labels up to date, so it's always fine to ask after the status.
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Sam Horowitz Sorry to be late here, but we are syncing Mailchimp and Populi by using the APIs available for both, but it's all custom and it's really fragile (maybe if I was a better coder…). Anyway, it's possible today, but it's a pain. Would be lovely if Populi could do some of the work for us, especially now that Mailchimp natively understands the concept of tags.
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Nathan Phillips perhaps an integration with a third party "connector" like Zapier would be best for everyone.
Zapier already has Mail Chimp integrations, So Populi only has to do the work once.
If Populi connected to Zapier, then there could be lots of options. Alternatively, it's possible to build custom connections to something like Zapier (or there are other similar services) using your system's APIs. If anyone is interested in doing that, I'd be open to exploring some group effort.
Zapier is a bit consumer-ey, but we use it a bit, for a small institution it works OK.
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Nic Toney I think this would be great!
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Benji Swafford Yes! This would be very helpful!
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Vadim Chepurny Please add the ability to sync all contacts and inquiry leads with mailchimp. Along with syncing names and emails, the integration should add custom tags based on individual roles in Populi.
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Joshua Walker Nathan Phillips (and whole thread). I created a feature request for Zapier 3 years ago. If y'all want to add your upvotes it would be a great way to kill multiple birds with one stone. https://support.populiweb.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000937094-Add-to-Zapier
Also, I'm exploring creating some Zaps for Populi for integration with our CRM. If anyone is interested in a group effort, I would be up for contributing to that. I'm looking at how difficult it is; maybe we can figure out how to do it ourselves.
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Evan Donovan Joshua Walker, did you ever figure out how to do Zaps with Populi? It was too difficult for me, because it would've required using node.js to turn Populi's SOAP API replies into JSON replies.
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Joshua Walker @Evan Donovan, we were not able to do it. The company we contacted was pretty pricey for our school. And I haven't had time to put into it lately.
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Elijah Friedeman I would love a Mailchimp/Populi integration. It would take care of some of the key functionality lacking in Populi's admissions side.
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Carlos Marin Has anyone figured out this problem?
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Evan Donovan Sam Horowitz Would you be willing to share with others in the community the code you're using to integrate Populi with Mailchimp? We just started using Mailchimp, and we would love to be able to do this. If you'd prefer to keep it private, I can understand, but it would be very helpful.
I've done some work with the Populi API before, which I've shared on Github here: https://github.com/techmission/populi_api_framework/tree/framework-v2. So I may be able to help generalize what you worked on. -
Sam Horowitz It's not *great* code, honestly, and there's quite a bit that's idiosyncratic to what we're doing. But the Mailchimp PHP SDK is pretty easy to work with, and the Populi API is reasonable, too. We're doing some stuff in between to make sure we're sending over fields that are useful.
If I had the time, though, we'd be looking at another email option. I'm getting fed up with MC.
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AJ Zimmermann We are a church-based ministry training school and looking to integrate with Tithe.ly Messaging tool (not the best for education but hey, we are a little bit of both). Any recommendations for setting up automated syncs for contact lists?
We've had some trouble with the Populi email tool - hard to add graphics or make the emails have the same "look and feel" as our marketing materials.