Mailout features

[BenSturmfels]

Hi Folks,

I'm curious as to how other organisations on Houdini are dealing with email mailouts and what Houdini's philosophy is here. I've seen some references to MailChimp in the interface - is that what most are using? How does that workflow look in practice? Is it a one-way sync to MailChimp? What happens with unsubscribes/deceased supporters? Are you putting non-financial members into Houdini, or are these being put straight into MailChimp?

What we're hoping to be able to segment supporters based on things like how recently they've donated. We'd then like to compose and send a templated message with their name at the top. We'd also like to be able to keep track of what messages went out and who they went to, both at a campaign level and when we look at an individual's profile.

I completely understand that this is a huge and complicated feature, and I appreciate why offloading this to MailChimp might be appropriate. Unfortunately MailChimp isn't a great fit for our organisation being proprietary software (the organisation advocates free and open source). I've also felt the pain of managing two separate databases of contacts (ie. Houdini and Mailchimp) in the past, so I realise that there are challenges down that path too.

Just hoping to solicit some thoughts here. I know we can't wave a magic wand and create a mailout feature. :)

Regards,
Ben