If you use a tool like Mailchimp to manage your contacts and communications for marketing and promotional purposes, you can configure SparqFest to send any contacts who register with us up to that tool.
Marketing emails vs transactional emails
SparqFest manages its own transactional emails (emails relating to the core function of the festival). We do not send marketing emails. For sending marketing emails, we recommend you get a contact management tool that will help you make sure you are honoring your privacy requirements and properly structuring your marketing and promotional communications. Our marketing email integration is thus focused on making sure SparqFest works well with whatever tool you choose for contact management.
Supported Contact Management Tools
This feature currently supports only Mailchimp.
If you have a different contact management tool that you would like to see us support, please reach out to us.
Contact Management Overview
SparqFest is a touch point for most festival contacts and often because the first point of direct interaction with many of them. Our contact management integration will automatically send new contacts into your contact management tool and tag them as audience members, creators, jurors, and staff members as is appropriate. If someone opts out of marketing communications in SparqFest or asks to be forgotten, we will automatically unsubscribe that user from relevant mailing lists.
Configuring Contact Management Integration
Integration with contact management tools is part of core SparqFest functionality and does not require any additional licensing. To connect SparqFest to your tool of choice, go to “Account” > “Integrations”.
In this subsection, you are presented with all of the different services we integrate with. Services with a padlock represent integrations that require additional licensing. You should see an “Email Marketing” integration that says “Not Configured”. Click it to start the process.
When you first click on the “Email Marketing” panel, you will be presented with a screen asking you which tool you use for contact management. Select the supported tool you use. SparqFest will then present you with configuration options specific to that tool.
Mailchimp
There are two separate steps to configuring Mailchimp integration:
- Entering your security credentials
- Defining your synchronization options
Security Credentials
The first step requires two piece of data from Mailchimp:
- Your Mailchimp server
- Your Mailchimp API key for SparqFest
To get the server, login to your Mailchimp account and go to the dashboard. Look at the URL for your dashboard. It will be something like “https://us14.admin.mailchimp.com”. In this example, the server is “us14”. You therefore want to enter “us14” as the server in SparqFest.
Next, you should see your profile menu in the lower left hand side of your Mailchimp dashboard. It is the menu item with your name and your organization name. Select it to then select “Account and Billing” from the pop-up menu.
This will bring you to a new part of Mailchimp with many different configuration items. For SparqFest integration, you want to select the “Extras” menu and click on “API Keys”.
In this middle of this page is a list of API keys. Yours will likely be empty. Click on the “Create a Key” button to generate a key for SparqFest. Mailchimp will generate a key. Before you copy this key, make sure to give the API key a label like “SparqFest” so you know which key is in use by SparqFest.
Now, copy the key from Mailchimp and paste it into the API key field in SparqFest.
The “Verify Server” button in SparqFest should now be enabled for you to test these keys. Click that button to make sure everything is looking good.
We encrypt these keys in our database
Obviously, we need to store these keys so SparqFest can talk with Mailchimp. In keeping with our policies relating to the storage of any sensitive information, we encrypt these keys inside our database. Consequently, they are not usable by any hacker who manages to obtain our database.
If you successfully configured the server and API keys, SparqFest will come back with a list of your audiences in the “List ID” drop down. Otherwise, you will be presented with an error and instructions on how to correct the error.
Audience Configuration
SparqFest synchronizes all Mailchimp contacts with the same audience in Mailchimp. Pick the audience where you want us to send contacts. Following on recommended Mailchimp practices, we segment your audience using tags.
You should not touch the merge fields unless you have done something unique to Mailchimp. The merge fields basically help us map our “given name” field to whatever Mailchimp is using to store a “first name” field. The default for Mailchimp is FNAME and LNAME for first name and last name. Almost no one changes that mapping. If you have, however, you can enter the fields you created here.
The tag fields impact how we tag each audience member in Mailchimp. By default, we tag contacts as:
- sparqfest.audience
- sparqfest.creator
- sparqfest.judge
- sparqfest.staff
You should change these to whatever gives those terms meaning in your marketing and communications processes. At Minnesota WebFest, we change these mappings for each edition:
- audience:2022
- selection:2022
- jury:2022
- staff:2022
Hit save and SparqFest will start pushing your contacts into Mailchimp.