Latest Buzz - The Membee Blog

Users Select Which Columns Are Exported in a Report’s CSV File

Membee’s reporting engine provides users with powerful data filtering capabilities to select just the records that meet their criteria. Fox example, the ability to set filters to select a specific subset of members is a daily occurrence for many Membee users. But once the selection process is complete, this is where Membee users vary greatly in what they wish to do with the member data meeting their filter criteria. Often the selected records are headed for an exported CSV file for use outside of Membee.

Whether its using the CSV file of selected records in a mail merge, organizing the records in a special way in Excel or custom report generator, or even passing the selected records to another application, the purpose for the CSV file varies greatly across Membee’s user base. As a result, Membee’s standard CSV exports (available for all 50+ of Membee’s standard reports) error on the side of providing likely many more columns of data than the user actually needs.  Providing too many columns of data in a CSV export file is far better than not including a much-needed column.

The sheer number of columns in many of Membee’s CSV files make the CSV file more difficult to work with which is a situation Membee’s users asked us to address. So we did. The July 31, 2010 release of Membee contained a great new feature that allows the user to completely control which columns are contained in the exported CSV file for all of Membee’s reports and save this “export” configuration for future use with the report.

Define an Export on Each Report’s Settings Page

A new “export” panel has been added to every Membee report’s Settings page.

Create Unlimited Export Definitions for Each Membee Report

Membee allows you to store unlimited export definitions for every report which is handy since often the same report is used to produce different CSV exports that are used for very different purposes. When you run this report in the future, all previously created export definitions are available for your use.

The CSV Options page allows you to:

• Name the export definition
• Mark the export definition as “private” – available only to you
• Provide a description – perhaps the export will be used by other Membee users in their organization
• Select the fields they want to be included in the export
• Save their new definition

Below is an example of a “Mailing Label” export definition for the popular Organization Contact Detail Report.

Select Your Export Definition When Creating the CSV Export

Once you get your handful of exports defined for your frequently used Membee reports, you can quickly select the export definition you want to use right when you create the CSV in Membee’s report job queue.

When you click on the CSV icon, Membee presents the list of previously defined export definitions so you can select one on the fly. Just select the export definition you wish to use and choose the “Create Selected Export” link.

By the way, you can also use the “Export All Fields” option to have Membee to produce its standard for “default” CSV file for your report.

Save An Export as Part of a Report Favorite

Membee’s Report Favorite feature is very popular with organizations simply because it makes it easy for infrequent users to select and run complex Membee reports created by other Membee users in their organization.

Like any other setting for a report, the Export Definition can also be saved as a part of the report favorite which makes it easy for infrequent users in your organization to now run a report you setup for them and get the CVS file they want.

More Details

For more details on how to use this new feature, check out the article Selecting the Fields to Export in a CSV File in Membee’s Tips & Tricks forum (requires your Membee username and password).

It's Here! – Integrated Email in Membee

This information was originally shared with all Membee users earlier today via email.  We wanted to share the news with our entire audience here as well.  Most links in this post require an active Membee username and password for access.

We’re pleased to announce that Membee’s much anticipated new Integrated Email feature is now available in BETA release (see below).  The feature allows you to:

• Send email messages to individual people directly from the Membee interface. Sent messages can be automatically stored (including attachments) in the recipient’s record in Notes & To-Dos.    
• Send broadcast email messages to groups, committees, and event attendees and personalize each message with basic merge variables. Optionally, you can also add a record of each message sent to the Notes & To-Dos section for each recipient of your broadcast message. You can even remove certain individual recipients from a particular email and add others who are not part of the group, committee, or event.
• Send messages to filtered segments of your membership using Membee’s flexible reporting system. You can use this feature to send emails to all members, all prospects, certain levels or types of members, and much, much more.
• Automatically set up optional follow-up To-Dos for each recipient that are stored and tracked in Membee’s Notes & To-Dos area. You can even assign follow up tasks to your colleagues. Note – if you choose to set up a follow up to-do for a broadcast message, an individual to-do will be set up for every recipient (this cannot be undone). 

Scroll down to see a full list of features and some important information to review before you get started using Integrated Email.

 
Learn how to set up Integrated Email »

Frequently Asked Questions

For your convenience, we have compiled a list of frequently asked questions about the new Integrated Email feature below.


Integrated Email is currently in BETA release - what does this mean?

Integrated Email is available in BETA release for the time being.  Although we have tested this feature extensively internally, we recommend that all users complete their own tests before proceeding with full scale use.   We are unable to test all possible emailing scenarios, SMTP server configurations and email settings.  

If you would like to use the Integrated Email function while it is in BETA release, please start by sending test messages to a small group of people, ideally your colleagues or trusted connections.  If you encounter an issue, please report it to Membee support as soon as possible.  We will update the release status of Integrated Email in early July after receiving and processing feedback from users.

What do I need to know before I get started?

Before you get started using Integrated Email please review the following items first:

• BETA release: Note that this feature is in BETA release, please prepare and send test email messages to small groups before using this feature for large broadcasts.  Report any issues encountered to Membee support.
• Each user must complete set-up:  Each user will need to set up the email feature in Membee’s Admin menu – Under Email > Integrated Email Set-up and follow the instructions found on the Membee support website.  You can confirm that you’ve successfully set up the feature by clicking “Send Test Email”.  If you get a “Success” message from Membee, Integrated Email is working!
• Know your sending limit (if you have one): Since Membee uses your email server to send email messages, you will need to check with your network administrator, ISP or email provider (whoever manages your email service) and find out if your account is subject to a sending limit or sending rate limit.  If you have a limit, you will need to know what that limit is before you start using Integrated Email.  Learn more about sending limits »  
• Ensure that your SMTP (outgoing) mail server is accessible via the Internet:  Membee sends email through your existing email servers.  As a result, your SMTP email server must be accessible from outside your office via the Internet and must allow connections from external sources. Sometimes these types of connections have been restricted or disabled. Your system/network administrator can assist you in determining if this is an issue for your office.  If your administrator is unable to change this setting, please send us a note at support@membee.com or create a support ticket to learn about other options.

If your organization is subject to a sending limit that is too low to make effective use of the new Integrated Email function, there are other options available.  Send us a note at support@membee.com or create a support ticket to find out more.

How do I get started?

To get started, visit our help document that contains the full set-up instructions for Integrated Email.  

Where can I find Integrated Email?

Once you’ve completed the set-up process, you can access this feature by:

• Clicking on any email address in Membee
• Clicking Email links below lists of participants on the Committees, Groups and Events screens.
• Clicking the new email icon in the “Job Queue Search” after running most reports in Membee.

What are the major features?

• Send email using your organization’s regular email server – from your own email address.
• Email individual people simply by clicking on any email address in Membee.
• Email the participants of any committee, group, or event.
• Remove individual recipients from messages sent to participants of committees, groups and events.
• Email segmented groups of members and prospects using Membee’s reporting function.
• Add additional recipients by email address.
• Add CC and BCC recipients to any message.
• Personalize each message with basic merge variables.
• Add basic formatting to your messages using Membee’s message editor.
• Add one or more attachments to your messages.
• Preview your message before sending.
• Create an email signature and include your logo and other promotional messages and links.
• Store the contents of the message sent to each recipient (including any attachments) in the Notes & To-Dos section of the recipient’s record in Membee. 
• Set a Contact Type for your notes to allow for easy reporting and filtering of notes.
• Create follow up To-Dos for each recipient and assign them to yourself or one of your colleagues.
• Receive a confirmation email each time your message was successfully sent to your email server by Membee.
• Receive all bounce back messages and responses to your email messages in your regular inbox – paste them into Notes in Membee as desired.

Happy emailing folks!  Please contact customer service by creating a support ticket if you have any questions.

The Membee Team

Introducing Quick Search in People & Organizations

We are excited to announce another new feature in Membee that was inspired by the feedback of Membee's growing user base.

Over the past couple of weeks, Membee's development team has been hard at work developing a simple new way to search for People and Organizations in Membee. It's called Quick Search. The new function is basically a keyword search of the text that's contained in the names of all of the People and Organizations in your copy of Membee.  

The new Quick Search function is best used when you know at least a part of the name (of either a person or company/organization) that you are looking for. When you need to search for other items like address, city, email, etc., the main pop-up search function is still available.

 

 

The Quick Search function starts finding results as soon as you stop typing a word (or at least 3 characters of a word). The results that match the word(s) you typed will appear below the search box. Sometimes it will take a couple of seconds for results to come up.  If no results come up, Membee did not find any matches. To choose a result and open that person or organization record, either click the down arrow on your keyboard and hit "enter" on the appropriate name or move your mouse over the name and click on it (see below).  

  

 
   

We Look Forward to Hearing Your Feedback

We hope you enjoy the new Quick Search function. We plan to roll it out to the Events, Committees and Directories sections of Membee over the coming weeks, so we're eager to hear your feedback. Please let us know what you think by submitting a comment below or by submitting a support ticket using the Membee Support Website (Membee username and password required).

          

Reminder: Membee Hosting Infrastructure Upgrade

Sunday, April 25, 2010

A quick reminder about a system upgrade that's happening this weekend.  A notice about this upgrade was originally posted on our MembeeStatus.com website on April 13, 2010.

Membee’s managed hosting partner will be completing some important infrastructure upgrades to Membee’s hosting environment on Sunday, April 25, 2010 from 12:00am Midnight Eastern Time (04:00 am UTC) to 8:00am Eastern Time (12:00pm Noon UTC).   As a result of these upgrades, Membee’s administrative interface and Membee-hosted websites may be inaccessible for periods of time during this window. 

Read More »

Stay on Top of Membee's System Status Updates

The latest information about Membee's system status and planned maintenance/upgrades are always posted on the MembeeStatus.com website.  If you would like to follow our system status updates, you can subscribe to our RSS feed or follow MembeeStatus on Twitter. 

Have a great weekend! :-)

  

New Features Added to Membee

March and April have been busy months for Membee’s development team.  We have introduced a host of new features that have been getting rave reviews from users so far.  Here’s the lowdown on some of the biggest enhancements we’ve made recently.
  

• Data Exceptions Reports – Who is Missing What Data?

  Membee has introduced two cool new reports that are similar to ones we pioneered in an older client/server version of our software some time ago.   The reports are called Data Exceptions and Listing Exceptions.   Both of these reports do basically the same thing in different areas of Membee. They provide a list of people and organization records that are missing data.  With this list in hand, you can correct the missing information and ensure that your data is consistent across all records.
  
  When and How to Use These New Reports
  
  Would you like a list of all members in your database who are missing email addresses, membership billing, phone numbers, categories, or any one of 25 other criteria?  Use the “Data Exceptions” report to get that list so you can make corrections.   When you are preparing to launch your online membership directory or when you are preparing the data for your printed directory, you can also produce a similar report called “Listing Exceptions”.  This report will generate a list of people and organizations that are missing listings or are missing specific details in their listing like an address, website URL, phone number and 5 other items.
  
  How to Access the Reports
  
  
  Visit the Reports screen of Membee from the main navigation menu, type “exceptions” in the Name field at the top of the Reports and Exports screen and click the Search button.
      

• Quick Event Sale Screen Now Available from People & Organizations

  The popular Quick Event Sale screen ( learn more ) is now available directly from each person and organization in Membee's administrative interface.  It is also still available from the Events section of Membee for times when you are processing a group of transactions at once. This form allows you to complete super-quick manual event registrations.  It’s most useful for simple events as you can only sell one item per transaction (use the standard Event Sale screen for more complex transactions).  
    

• Streamlined Online Event Registration

  Thanks to the feedback of a wide range of Membee customers, we have made a number of enhancements that are aimed at streamlining online event registration.   In short, we’ve converted event registration into a simple 4 step process that offers clear on-screen guidance at each step.   We're always looking for ideas on how we can further improve the event registration process. Send us your ideas by submitting a support ticket from the Membee Help screen.
    
  
     

• Streamlined Service Center Update Process

  Over the past few months, we have introduced a number of enhancements aimed at reducing the time it takes to review and accept incoming event registrations and member profile updates (submitted by members on your website).   These changes have removed a number of steps from the process so that you can get through your tasks much more efficiently.   If you process online event registrations and profile updates, you’ve likely already noticed the enhancements.  We hope you like them!
    

• Print Invoices Directly from Quick Event Sale Screen

  Another popular new feature is a link to “Print Invoice” on the Quick Event Sale screen.  This allows you to easily and quickly print an invoice while processing individual event sales.  To try it out, look for the checkbox labeled “Print Invoice” on the Quick Event Sale screen.
  
  
   
    

Lots More to Come - Including Integrated Email in Late May

There’s lots more enhancements in the works over the next few months, including the highly anticipated Integrated Email Function ( described in a previous blog post ).   This function is scheduled for official release in late May.  The final release date will be announced first on Membee’s Facebook and Twitter accounts – follow us to get the details as soon as they are available:

•    Follow Membee on Twitter

•    Follow Membee on Facebook

    

We’re Looking for a Few Great Facebook Pages

 

Do you operate a Facebook Page for your association?  Send us the link to your page and we'll add it to the "Favorite Pages" box on the Membee Facebook Page.  Either submit a comment to this blog post with the link to your page or send the link to sales@membee.com.  

 

Share Your Innovative Facebook Page Ideas

We are also looking for Membee users who operate particularly innovative or popular Facebook Pages. We plan to feature some of those pages in our April edition of the Beeline newsletter.  When sending your link, please let us know where you've been particularly successful in using Facebook as a marketing and member recruitment/engagement tool.

 

Become Membee's Fan

We post new information to our Facebook Page each week, including links to the latest information from Membee and links to various blog posts/articles of interest for association professionals.

 

Become a Fan of Membee on Facebook »

 

Learn More about Facebook Pages for your Association

You can learn more about how nonprofits are using Facebook at:

• Official Nonprofits on Facebook Page
• So you want a Facebook Fan Page for Your Nonprofit? Here's the Scoop! - Posted in 2009, this article contains lots of useful tips that are still relevant today. 
• Facebook Best Practices - A great list of things to consider when creating and maintaining a Facebook page.

Do you know of other resources about creating a great Facebook page?   Post a comment below with the link.

 

Just 2 Days Left to Save up to 39% on Personal Training

Update (05/04/2010):  Due to popular demand, discount deadline has been extended until April 16, 2010.

A quick reminder that there is just two days left to save between 33% and 39% off of our regular personalized training rates!  If you’ve been thinking about reserving a session, please order by March 31, 2010 April 16, 2010 to get access to the reduced pricing.

Membee’s Personal Training services are delivered in 2-hour sessions via an Internet connection, one-on-one with a live Membee Training Specialist. The training is conducted using your own membership data, wherever possible. 

The Personal Training sessions are a great way to get detailed information about a particular topic, or you can use a session to get a series of questions answered.  The sessions are often used in conjunction with Membee’s free training and help resources to form a complete training package.

Learn more about Personal Training & discounted pricing >

Free Training Webinars Also Available

Remember, Membee also offers our 12-part Training Webinar Series to all of our customers, free of charge.   

Learn more about the Training Webinar Series and sign up >

Email in Membee – Part 3: Powerful Email Capability in Key Areas of Membee

This post is the third of a three part series outlining how using Membee gives you a platform from which you can quickly and easily handle the delivery of emails to various groups and for varying purposes. In the first post, “How Membee Handles Different Types of Emails”, we outlined how the size of the email’s recipient group and the purpose for the email determine the best way to construct and deliver that email. In the second post in the series entitled “Using MailChimp for Promotional Emails”, we reviewed how Membee’s tight integration with MailChimp makes it easy to deliver great-looking emails to large groups of members with minimal steps and effort.

In this post, we think we’ve saved the best for last! We’re focusing on great new email capability coming to Membee. We have looked closely at how the use of email fits into the day-to-day operations of a well run association. Each day, there is a need to send a “quick email” to a member or this committee or that group of event attendees and producing the email is a “task” on a staff member’s to do list. While this task obviously needs to be done well, it also needs to be done quickly because its not the only task on the list. We call these emails the “working emails” that keep things moving in your organization and we wrote this question to guide our design of this new Membee feature:

How can we make it as easy and as fast as possible to construct and deliver these working emails?

We think this new feature answers this question by making it easy to deliver emails in a couple of clicks to:

• Any person
• A Group
• A Committee
• A Committee Meeting’s attendees
• For a specific event
  • Purchasers
    • All purchasers for the event
    • Purchasers of a specific event item
  • Attendees
    • All attendees for the event
    • All attendees for a specific event item

There is a tremendous amount of capability in this new feature, so why don’t we walk through an example to highlight some of the key features.

Lets use the example of a change in location for the upcoming Board of Directors meeting. In Membee, you simply navigate to the committee as outlined below:

So, in one click, the new Membee Email form is presented to you. Below is the full form.

Lets focus in on some specific features.

Membee assumes that the current user is the “sender”, in this example, Ray is logged into Membee but Ray could send the email on behalf of a co-worker by choosing another Membee user from the pick list.

Membee has a look at the list of recipients, in this example, the Board of Directors and identifies recipients with missing or invalid email addresses. In this example, we click the “1 recipient is missing an address” link to see which Board member that is.

Membee makes it easy to have a quick look at the list of recipients and even modify the list.

Recipients with a blank or invalid email address are highlighted on the list of recipients.

If you wish, you can remove a recipient from the list simply by un-checking the check box.

Closing the Edit Recipient List form returns you to the Email form.

Lets move on and highlight a few more features. Next,  the ability to upload and attach a file to your email is done using the “Add Attachment” feature.

Membee’s email feature includes a full text editor make it easier to format the body of your email. You can even fully personalize the email using the built in merge variables. In our example, the email will use the recipient’s first name.

We want Membee’s Notes & To-Dos feature to be the one-stop-shop for all the contact with a member. For this reason, we’ve integrated the new email feature to make it easy to insert a copy of the email into each member’s Notes & To-Dos. In our example, the 19 Board members will have a copy of the email automatically attached to their member record simply by checking the “Summarize and attach as a note in Notes & To-Dos” check box.

Maybe your email requires follow up. You can easily create a “To-Do” for yourself or a co-worker and have Membee attach the To-Do to each the recipient’s member record. Common uses for this feature would include emails to a sales lead or a retention email. Let Membee create the To Dos for you in seconds by checking the “Create future To-Do” check box. You can then specify the date and time for the follow-up, which staff member should do the follow up and provide a description of the task to be done.

Use the “Preview” feature to have a quick look at the email before it goes.

Hit “Send the Email” and you’re done!

To summarize, whether it’s to a single member to a group, a couple clicks and the email is gone!

How Does Membee Send the Email?

Good question. Basically, Membee is going to use your existing email server to send the emails. For each member of your staff, you will provide Membee with the very same information you currently use to connect your Outlook email software client with your existing email server. For each of your staff members, you will provide Membee with some basic information to set this up including the URL to your email server, each staff member’s username and password on that server and the level of security used to connect to the server. You only need to do this setup step once.

Payment Gateway Support Expanded

In one of our recent Membee upgrade releases we quietly expanded our credit card payment gateway support by adding the Beanstream gateway to the list.

Membee’s standard package includes the ability to accept credit card payments via your website for your event registrations and dues invoices.  In order to utilize this function, your organization will require a subscription to a payment gateway and an online merchant account.   Your merchant account can come from almost any provider.  If you don’t have a merchant account or a payment gateway, we can assist you in setting one up.

With so many Membee users launching our e-billing and online event registration systems in the past few months, adding support for the popular Beanstream gateway just made sense!

Membee now supports the following payment gateways:

• Authorize.net (U.S. only)
• PayPal Payflow Link (U.S. and international)
• Beanstream (U.S. and Canada) – NEW!
• Moneris and PSI Gate (Canada only)

Learn more about setting up payment gateways in Membee >  (Membee username / password required)

Remember, all Membee subscriptions include the ability to process an unlimited number of transactions at no additional charge.  Membee never charges transaction fees of any kind.

If you would like to check out the details about recent Membee releases just visit membeestatucom.   You can also follow membeestatus on Twitter  to be notified of each release (along with other information about Membee’s system status and planned maintenance windows).

Also, check out our recent post on how to reissue an invoice via email in just one click.

Email Integration Preview Post Next Week

The highly anticipated post about the new integrated email feature in Membee will be released next week on the Membee blog.   Watch for it!

Email in Membee – Part 2: Using MailChimp for Promotional Emails

Welcome to the second of our three part series describing Membee’s strategy for handling emails to your members.   The purpose of the series is twofold.  First, to provide background information about different types of messages and how they can be handled now in Membee.  Second, to provide an overview of what we’re doing to make each type of email message as easy as possible for you and your colleagues to manage. 

In part one of the series we described how Membee is intended to handle each of the most common types of member email.   In this second post, we will describe how Membee can work with the tremendously popular MailChimp email marketing tool to send your promotional broadcast emails to all of your members (or large segments of your membership).  In most cases, these emails are promotional in nature (such as email newsletters, advertisements for upcoming meetings and events, etc.) and thus are likely to be subject to email marketing legislation such as CAN-SPAM.

Why not use Outlook or Membee’s Upcoming Integrated Email System?

Many people have asked us why it’s better use an email marketing tool to send your large scale promotional messages – why not just use Outlook or Membee’s upcoming integrated email system?   While there are a number of reasons, the most important two are:

1. Deliverability – Broadcast email marketing tools offer a number of techniques  to ensure that your messages make it through spam filters and protect your organization’s email system from being black-listed as a “spammer”.   Although no Membee users send messages that would be considered spam by any conventional definition, it’s quite possible to be branded this way unintentionally.  MailChimp provides a number of tools to improve the deliverability of your messages.  Membee’s upcoming integrated email system uses your existing email server to send messages and is intended primarily to allow you to quickly send messages to smaller groups (committees, groups, event attendees and individual members).  Most Membee customers will encounter a limit in the number of messages that you can send at one time from Outlook or from Membee’s Integrated Email System since both employ your existing email server.  Using an email marketing tool will avoid this limit.
    
2. Performance tracking – When sending an email to all of your members, it can be helpful to get some idea of how many people are reading your message and clicking on links.  When you first start using these tools, you can use the initial results to set performance benchmarks that you can work to improve on over time.  Most email services offer reporting on email performance, and MailChimp has one of the strongest offerings in this area.  Membee’s upcoming integrated email system is designed for smaller scale email messages that do not require these advanced performance tracking capabilities.

Why MailChimp over Other Email Marketing Services?  

Here at Membee, we are big fans of MailChimp.  It is easy-to-use, reliable and they offer a feature list that rivals all of the major players in this category of software.  The pricing of the MailChimp service is also more compatible with the budgets and member email delivery patterns of membership-based organizations. 

As you read on, you will see how Membee takes advantage of MailChimp’s Application Programming Interface (API) which saves Membee users time and steps when sending an email to a large group of recipients. Other email marketing tools may get close to some of MailChimp’s other features but none can compare to MailChimp’s ability to work seamlessly with products like Membee. Other email marketing tools require you to repeat an “export, modify, and import” process to get information out of Membee and into the tool. To us, its all about reducing complexity for our users.  With something as important as your promotional email messages, we want to work with a tool that makes it easy to build great-looking messages and send them quickly and easily.

Membee isn’t directly affiliated with MailChimp, so you’ll need to visit their site for details about the product.  To give you a quick overview, we’ve embedded an overview video below.  

Learn more about MailChimp / Sign up for a free trial account >

You can also learn more about how to use MailChimp by viewing their getting started videos.

How Does Membee Work with MailChimp? 

Membee’s integration with MailChimp is intended to reduce the time required to manage a list of members in MailChimp, while also allowing you to take advantage of Membee’s advanced member segmentation and selection capabilities.   In the following section, we’ve provided a brief overview of the how Membee’s integration with MailChimp works.

In addition to its email formatting, tracking and performance analysis features, MailChimp is also designed to store lists of the people to whom you would like to send email messages.  For most of our users, the most up-to-date list of members is actually stored in Membee.    Our integration between Membee and MailChimp is designed to make it easy to keep the information in MailChimp and Membee synchronized.

The one-time set-up for this function takes just a few minutes:

1. Set-up an account at MailChimp
2. Create a list in MailChimp – remember the name of the list, you will need to tell Membee which list you want to synchronize
3. Define the list of fields that you would like to have available in MailChimp for personalized merge emails (another cool feature of MailChimp).  You can choose from a variety of fields that are available to synchronize with Membee – simply set up a corresponding field in MailChimp for each.  Available fields include: 
   • First name
   • Last name
   • Full Name
   • Address
   • Phone 1, 2 and 3
   • Mobile Number
   • Email (required by MailChimp)
   • Organization Name – the name of the person’s employer
   • Organization Category – The category of the person’s employer
   • Doing Business As – The commonly-used name of the person’s employee
4. Go to the Admin menu in Membee and open the “Bulk Email Integration Set-up” item
   
   
    
5. Enter your MailChimp API Key and choose the list you would like to synchronize with Membee – simply look for the list that you set up in step 2
6. Match the fields you set up in MailChimp with the fields that are available in Membee.

Now that the one-time set up is complete, you can simply follow a few steps to synchronize your list before each email you send.

1. Generate a report in Membee that contains the list of people you would like to include in your first email.  For example, generate a list of all members using Membee “Organization Contact Details" Report. 
2. When the report is done processing and the PDF version is available, click on the PDF and make sure that the list looks correct.  Membee will provide details on this report regarding people who cannot be included in the list sent to MailChimp because of data issues (such as the absence of an email address).
3. Click the MailChimp icon beside that report and Membee will synchronize your list in MailChimp with the list you just created in Membee.
     
    
     
4. Go to MailChimp and create a campaign
5. Select the list you want to use and choose the appropriate segment that was just created by Membee (details about how to do this are available here – Membee username and password required).

For a detailed review of how this function works and steps needed to get it set up, we’ve created a few topics in the Membee help area (Membee username and password required for access):

1. Overview of MailChimp/Membee integration
2. Setting up MailChimp/Membee integration
3. Sending a list to MailChimp in Membee

What about Other Email Marketing Tools?

There are many other companies that produce email marketing software, most of which can be used with Membee fairly easily to send an email to your entire list of members (although none as easily as MailChimp).   If your preferred email marketing platform includes the ability to import data from a CSV file, you emulate our integration with MailChimp by simply importing your Membee data into your email service with some frequency to ensure it is accurate and up-to-date.   The ability to synchronize and send to segmented lists is often more difficult; please consult your email software provider to determine the best way to do this. 

NEXT:  Part 3 – Membee’s New Integrated Email System

In the final part of our three part series about email in Membee, we will look at our upcoming Integrated Email system in more detail.  Watch for that final post in mid-February!