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Newsletter Connect 2.0: User Privacy, Field Mapping & ActiveCampaign

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Charitable Newsletter Connect 2.0 is out today, with a host of improvements. Besides featuring a deep integration with Charitable’s Contact Consent feature, the update also adds a powerful new field mapping tool and support for ActiveCampaign.

Powerful Field Mapping

In MailChimp, they’re called merge fields. In MailerLite, they’re referred to as subscriber fields. In Campaign Monitor and other providers, they’re referred to as custom fields.

No matter what they’re called, the concept is the same: they’re fields in your email marketing provider that can be used to store additional information about your donors.

All the email marketing providers that Charitable supports allow you to create your own custom fields, but until now there has never been an easy way to populate these fields based on the information someone provides when they donate.

Map your MailChimp merge fields to Charitable donation fields

Newsletter Connect 2.0 changes that, adding a simple, intuitive way for you to map your Charitable donation fields to your newsletter provider’s custom fields. It’s an incredibly powerful feature that opens up new opportunities for segmenting your newsletter list based on the information you’re collecting in your donation forms.

If you have added fields to your donation form using the Donation Fields API, you’ll be glad to know that these can also be easily connected.

Integration with Contact Consent

Last year we introduced Charitable’s Contact Consent feature, which allows donors to opt-in to receiving your organization’s ongoing marketing. With today’s update, Contact Consent is now deeply integrated with Newsletter Connect. That means that when your donor gives their contact consent, they are automatically added to the mailing list you have connected.

Of course, if donors later decide to opt out of contact consent via their profile, Newsletter Connect makes sure that when they do this they are also unsubscribed from any mailing lists they are subscribed to.

ActiveCampaign

Last but not least, we included support for ActiveCampaign, a popular email marketing and automation platform.

That brings our total number of supported providers to seven:

  • ActiveCampaign
  • Campaign Monitor
  • MailChimp
  • MailerLite
  • MailPoet 2
  • MailPoet 3
  • Mailster

We’re always on the lookout for more great newsletter providers to support, so if yours isn’t on the list, be sure to get in touch.

Changelog

  • Integrate newsletter signup with the Contact Consent feature built into Charitable. Newsletter Connect leverages this field and makes it more powerful, automatically adding donors who agree to be contacted to your mailing lists.
  • User Privacy: Added tools for exporting and erasing personal data. These are built on top of WordPress’ core user privacy tools.
  • MailChimp: Added list-specific settings for marketing permissions and merge fields. You can now specify how donation fields in Charitable should map to MailChimp’s merge fields.
  • MailChimp: Fixed a bug preventing all lists from being displayed if you have more than ten lists.
  • Campaign Monitor: Specify how donation fields in Charitable should map to Campaign Monitor’s custom fields.
  • Campaign Monitor: Added support for Campaign Monitor’s “Consent to Track” field.
  • MailerLite: Specify how donation fields in Charitable should map to MailerLite’s subscriber fields.
  • MailPoet 3: Specify how donation fields in Charitable should map to MailPoet’s custom fields.
  • Mailster: Specify how donation fields in Charitable should map to Mailster’s custom fields.
  • ActiveCampaign: Support added!
  • Removed unused Charitable_Newsletter_Connect_Campaign class.
author avatar
Eric Daams

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ambassadors New

🔑 Introducing Passwordless Fundraisers: Sign Up With Just an Email!

Supporters arrive wanting to help, and then the form asks them to invent a password for a website they may only visit twice. A lot of them stop right there. Passwordless Fundraiser Accounts, new in Charitable Ambassadors 3.5.0, let a supporter start a peer to peer fundraiser with nothing but an email address. Why this is important:

  • 🔑 No password step to lose them at: Switch it on in Charitable » Ambassadors » Templates » Submit Form and the create-fundraiser form asks only for a name, an email address and a page title.
  • 👤 Still a real WordPress account: One click in one email confirms the address, signs them in and creates the account, so they can come back later to edit their story, change their photo and see who has donated.
  • 🎚️ Your call on every campaign: Each peer to peer campaign can follow the site default or override it, which matters when a campaign pays fundraisers through Stripe Connect and those people do need a password.
  • 📋 See who has not clicked yet: The Charitable » Ambassadors » Directory » Awaiting Sign-In tab lists everyone still waiting, with the campaign they joined and a Resend button, so a typo or a spam folder is something you can spot and fix.
  • 🛡️ Links a scanner cannot use up: Opening the link only shows a page, and your fundraiser is signed in when they press the button on it, so corporate email scanners never burn the link. Each one works once, expires on its own and is stored only as a hash.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
ambassadors New

🏃 Introducing Activity: Show Progress on More Than Money!

Most peer-to-peer fundraisers are about more than the money. A read-a-thon is about minutes read, a walkathon is about miles walked, and a food drive is about meals packed. Activity for Charitable Ambassadors lets your fundraisers show that effort right beside the dollars they raise. Why this is important:

  • 🎯 Progress on what you actually count: A progress bar shows each thing you count against its own target, sitting right beside the money raised.
  • 🏅 Milestones for the yes or no things: A milestone badge marks the efforts that are simply done or not done, with no number to chase.
  • ✍️ Fundraisers log their own numbers: Your supporters enter their totals from their own pages, so the effort stops living in a spreadsheet, a comment, or nowhere at all.
  • 🤖 Some numbers count themselves: An AUTOMATIC tag appears wherever the site worked the figure out from completed donations, so you can see at a glance what nobody typed in.
  • 🧩 Set it up once, use it anywhere: You decide what gets counted one time, then choose which campaigns count it. Available now in Charitable Ambassadors 3.4.7, with no new plugin and no developer.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
ambassadors New

🖨️ Introducing Fliers and Posters: Raise Money Away From the Screen!

A lot of peer-to-peer fundraising happens away from a screen: at the finish line of a 5K, on a school noticeboard, in an office kitchen. Charitable Ambassadors 3.4.7 adds 2 printables, a fundraiser flier carrying each fundraiser’s own story and QR code, and a recruitment poster that signs new fundraisers up. Both open as a normal web page and print straight from the browser. Why this is important:

  • 🏁 A flier for every fundraiser: Each one carries that fundraiser’s own photo, story and goal, with a QR code that opens their page rather than your main campaign.
  • 📌 A poster that recruits: It shows “Now Recruiting” above your campaign name with a large QR code that opens your sign-up form, so someone can start fundraising without waiting on a link from you.
  • 🪄 No design tool needed: Both printables render as a normal web page and print from the browser, with no PDF plugin and no designer.
  • 📄 2 flier layouts: Hand out carries the full story for giving to friends and family, and Post up carries a short hook with 5 tear-off tabs for a noticeboard.
  • 🛡️ Off until you switch it on: Fliers stay off after the update until you enable them under Charitable » Ambassadors » Other » Fliers, and only the owner or an administrator can open one.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
Improvement Payments

💸 Introducing Tiered Rates for Fee Relief: Match the Ask to the Gift!

Fee Relief asks your donors one short question at checkout: would you like to cover the processing fee on this gift? Until now that question used a single rate for every donation on a gateway, so a $10 gift and a $500 gift were asked for the same percentage. Fee Relief 1.3.0 lets you set as many donation bands as you like, each carrying its own rate. Why this is important:

  • 🪙 Gentler on small gifts: A fixed transaction cost is a far bigger share of a $10 donation than a $500 one, so bands let you ask for less at the bottom.
  • 🎚️ As many bands as you need: Each band carries its own percentage and its own fixed amount, and the top band runs on with no upper limit.
  • 🛑 An optional ceiling: A Maximum fee field stops any donor being asked for more than a number you choose, however large the gift.
  • 🔌 Set per payment gateway: Stripe can run on four bands while Windcave and Payfast stay on a single rate, because bands belong to a gateway and not to your whole site.
  • 🛡️ Nothing changes until you say so: Your current rates stay exactly as they are until you switch Use Tiered Rates on under Charitable » Settings » Advanced » Fee Relief.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
Donations Improvement

📊 Your Pro Dashboard Can Now Compare, Export, and Score!

Most fundraising dashboards only tell you how much you have raised. Charitable Pro 1.8.19 rebuilds the dashboard and the Reports Overview around the harder questions: whether anything is broken, whether this period beat the last one, and which single change would make the most difference today. Why this is important:

  • 📈 Every figure has a trend: Pick a period and the tiles and the chart move together, with each total shown against the previous period.
  • 🗓️ Charts that stay readable: Short ranges group donations day by day, while longer ranges group by week or month, so a full year reads as a curve instead of a flat line.
  • 🔀 Compare any 2 periods: Not just consecutive ones, so you can ask how this December did against last December. That matters because fundraising is seasonal.
  • 📤 Export the whole summary: Send the full overview out as CSV or PDF, ready for a board pack or a funder report.
  • 🎯 Score your setup for free: Have your fundraising setup scored, so the one change worth making next is the one you can see.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams