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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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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
Feature New

🎟️ Introducing Charitable Events: Sell Tickets Inside Your Campaigns!

Most nonprofits sell event tickets in one tool and collect donations in another, which leaves two sets of reports and a manual match at the end of the year. Charitable Events brings both together, selling tickets through the same donation forms and payment gateways you already run in Charitable. Why this is important:

  • 🎟️ Every ticket is a donation: Ticket sales run through the gateway you already use and count toward the campaign goal, with everything managed under Charitable » Events.
  • 📱 QR check-in from any phone: Each attendee gets their own QR code on the receipt, and volunteers scan at the door through a check-in link that needs no WordPress account.
  • 🧾 Receipts ready for tax time: Give each ticket type a fair market value, and Charitable puts the correct tax-deductible amount on every donor receipt.
  • 📋 Attendee details at checkout: Ask every guest for a meal choice, shirt size, or access needs, with a separate attendee record created for each ticket.
  • 🗓️ Blocks and calendars included: Three editor blocks plus Sugar Calendar and The Events Calendar support put your events where supporters already look.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
ai New

🚀 Unleash AI Power in Charitable!

Your AI assistant can now build, edit, and manage your Charitable fundraising campaigns directly — just by asking. With Charitable Pro adding write support for the WordPress Abilities API, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor can handle full administrative actions safely through MCP. Why this is important:

  • 🤖 Campaign creation in plain language: Prompt your assistant with a goal like “Set up a fundraiser for the shelter with a $5,000 goal”, and it builds a real draft campaign complete with suggested donation tiers.
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Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
Improvement Payments

💰 Accept Recurring Donations with Windcave and Charitable

A donor sets their gift up once on Windcave’s secure payment page, and Charitable bills every renewal after that on schedule. Why this is important:

🏦 Organizations banked in New Zealand or Australia: monthly giving on the gateway your bank already set you up with, with no second processor to onboard.
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📅 Operating funds rather than one-time campaigns: switch on Recurring Only mode and the one-off option disappears, so every gift to that campaign is a subscription.
🧾 Teams with no developer on staff: 3 sets of credentials pasted into a settings page, and no code anywhere.

Check out our announcement here.

author avatar
Eric Daams
automation update

⚡ Visual Automation Builder: Drag and Drop With No Code!

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🧩 Many actions, one trigger: Tag a donor, send an email, add a note, and fire a webhook from a single event, dragged into any order.

✉️ Act inside Charitable: New Send Email, Tag Donor, and Add Donor Note actions run with no external service required.

🔤 Merge tags: Personalize emails and notes with live fields like {first_name}, {total}, and {campaign_name}.

🔁 Apply to existing donors: Run Tag Donor and Add Donor Note against the donors you already have.

🖥️ Canvas or Simple: Switch views anytime, and automations built before 2.3.0 keep working unchanged.

Read more here.

author avatar
Eric Daams