Email & SMS
Ballot Signal + Mailchimp
What is Mailchimp?
Still the default email tool for local and county campaigns that have not bought a political-specific platform yet.
It sits in the Email & SMS category of a campaign stack. The channels that live or die on a defensible consent record.
Who uses it
Nonpartisan. Used across both parties and by nonpartisan organizations.
How the Ballot Signal + Mailchimp integration works
The supporter record maps to an audience member. The member identifier is the MD5 hash of the lowercased email address, which lines up neatly with our own lowercased-email dedupe key, so an existing subscriber is updated rather than re-added. Consent timestamp, consent version and consent source URL map to merge fields; page-intent signals map to tags; and you can route different intents to different groups. OAuth access tokens do not expire, but the data-center prefix must be resolved from the OAuth metadata endpoint before request URLs are constructed — Ballot Signal handles that for you.
What syncs
- Audiences / Lists
- Members
- Merge Fields
- Tags
- Groups
Field mapping
The supporter record is the same shape everywhere. What changes is where each field lands. The full record is documented on what you get.
| Supporter record | Messaging object | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| firstName, lastName | Subscriber / profile | Left empty rather than guessed when resolution is not confident. |
| Subscriber / profile — primary identifier | Primary match key. Lowercased before hashing. | |
| phone | Subscriber / profile — phone field | Included only when SMS-specific consent is present. |
| addressLine1, city, state, zip | Subscriber / profile — address fields | Third dedupe fallback. |
| consentTimestamp | Custom fields or merge fields | ISO 8601, UTC. |
| consentVersion | Custom fields or merge fields | The language in force at the moment of consent. |
| consentSource | Custom fields or merge fields | The exact page URL where consent was captured. |
| consentCategories | Custom fields or merge fields | Normalized from your consent platform. |
| intentSignals | Tags, lists or segments | Donate-page, volunteer-page, issue-page and any you define. |
| utmSource, utmMedium, utmCampaign, referrer | Custom fields or merge fields or source fields | Carried verbatim. |
| dedupeKey | Match key | Lowercased email hash. Match order: dedupeKey, then phone, then name + address. |
How to set it up
- 1
In Ballot Signal, add Mailchimp as a destination and connect with OAuth (or paste an API key).
- 2
Select the audience that identified supporters should be written to.
- 3
Create merge fields for consent timestamp, consent version and consent source URL, then map them.
- 4
Map each page-intent signal to a tag.
- 5
Decide whether new members should be added as subscribed or pending — pending sends Mailchimp's own confirmation email.
- 6
Push a test record and confirm the member, its merge fields and its tags.
Why it matters
Still the default email tool for local and county campaigns that have not bought a political-specific platform yet.
Related integrations
All Email & SMS →ActiveCampaign
Deep automation for small teams — the tag that arrives from us can start a whole nurture sequence without staff touching it.
EZ Texting
Low-cost texting many local campaigns already have a login for.
Tatango
Heavy political and nonprofit use, and strict about opt-in — which is exactly why a real consent record is the thing that makes a list usable here.
Scale to Win
Where a lot of Democratic peer-to-peer texting actually happens, and it inherits its consent posture from whatever VAN holds.
Ballot Signal + Mailchimp: questions
Is the Mailchimp integration available today?
Live. Built, tested and available to every customer today. You can turn this on yourself without talking to us.
What authentication does the Mailchimp integration use?
API key (HTTP Basic) or OAuth2. Credentials are stored encrypted and are never rendered back into the interface after entry.
Will this create duplicate records in Mailchimp?
No, assuming you leave deduplication on. We match on the lowercased-email hash first, then phone, then name plus address. On a match we update rather than create, and only the fields you have marked overwritable.
Does the consent record travel into Mailchimp?
Yes. Consent timestamp, consent version, consent source URL and granted categories are included in every push, by default, and there is no configuration that strips them. That is the point of the product.
Does connecting Mailchimp make a phone number legal to text?
No. Nothing does. We capture and preserve the consent evidence in the form platforms and carriers expect, so the consent you actually collected is provable. If you did not collect express written consent to send automated texts, we will not manufacture one. Read the TCPA page first.
See what your own website already knows.
Book a 20-minute walkthrough. We will look at your site's current consent posture first — that part is useful whether or not you buy anything.