Connect Mailchimp to add donors to an audience

Connect Mailchimp and new donors are added as contacts to a Mailchimp audience automatically, so your email list keeps up with your fundraising without a manual export.

Connect

1. Go to Integrations and open Mailchimp. You will see Mailchimp isn't connected yet.
2. Select Connect Mailchimp, then sign in to Mailchimp and approve access.
3. You are returned to the integration page.

Pick your audience, or nothing syncs

This second step is not optional. A freshly connected Mailchimp sits at Setup incomplete and will not sync anything until you choose an audience and save. Donately shows a blue banner saying Finish configuring Mailchimp to start syncing.

In the Configuration accordion, the Audience section opens automatically while nothing is selected. Choose from Choose an audience…, which lists the audiences in your connected account, then select Save changes. The help text confirms what happens: new donors are added as contacts to that audience.

The badge in the header then changes to Active.

If the dropdown cannot load your audiences, it falls back to a plain text box asking for a Mailchimp audience ID and warns that it could not fetch the list. You can paste an id in directly if you know it.

Other settings

Connection shows the connected account, and holds Reconnect Mailchimp for refreshing access or switching to a different Mailchimp account.

Advanced takes a JSON object for overriding the default field mapping between Donately and Mailchimp. Leave it blank to use the defaults.

Check that it worked

Make a small test donation, then look at Recent Activity on the integration page. See Create a test donation.

A failed row can be expanded for the error and offers Re-run this sync. To get these events by email, use the Get these events by email card, which takes you to your notification settings.

Pause or disconnect

Suspend syncing stops new donors flowing to Mailchimp while keeping your settings, and Resume syncing starts it again.

Disconnect is in the Danger zone at the bottom of the configuration. Your contacts already in Mailchimp are not deleted.

A note on consent

Donately adds donors to the audience you choose. Whether that is appropriate is a decision about your own mailing-list consent practice, not something the integration decides for you. If you only want to email donors who opted in, collect that opt-in on the form with a checkbox and segment on it in Mailchimp. See Custom fields.