Online Express - Email Only

Hi Stacey Brake‍ - I have never used MailChimp, so I cannot answer the comparison part of your question but I can share some of the functionality positives/negatives of OLX.


Like Denise mentioned, there are limitations to who can be sent an email from OLX - for instance email addresses have to live on a record, there are bandaids that you can employ to get around this but they are difficult to maintain. When it comes to pulling lists for OLX, you can merge queries (or even export them for further editing) in advance of scheduling a message to narrow down the specific groups of constituents you want to include - I would image that this is similar to what you already do for MailChimp.


Building the actual emails in OLX can be difficult at times, what you see in the edit window is not always how it appears in the test message. As you are unable to edit/view the HTML code, if you run into spacing or other issues related to the appearance of an area, it is often a trial/error experimentation to find a fix. Whenever I can, I copy a previously sent email to use as a template. Additionally, OLX only supports text, images, and links. If you want to say embed a video or GIF, this is not currently possible.


Adding the received/response information back in to RE is really quite easy, although it is not automatic and a user has to initiate it from the email stats window; it is very easy to forget to do this especially if you send a high number of emails. Additionally, while OLX very clearly displays the response stats, the downloaded information in RE will not auto-update - we typically wait 2 weeks before downloading the information into RE for this reason. While you can view the stats of each email sent, it is not possible to see of the stats of say all Newsletters together unless you record that information on an outside spreadsheet.


The unusable email section of OLX that lists out hard bounces and opt-outs works well. Depending on your set up, you can tie in OLX into Consent records and have an opt-out automatically result in a “Do Not Email” solicit code being added to their record (or whatever option works best within your system/standard).


In all, it works for us. We recently upgraded to NXT and are working through which email platform we will use in the future; currently it is a mix of both, OLX and NXT. There are pros and cons to any system; I recommend you find the right one for your organization. If you’d like to talk further about this you are welcome to send me a DM and we can set up a time to chat.

I second the comments from my fellow Murray, down below. We began with OLX (and we still use it for forms and event registrations), but ended up switching to Mailchimp for three main reasons:

• OLX only allows you basic merge fields like name and salutation. In Mailchimp, you have full control over your merge fields and can create hidden custom fields like last gift amount, constituency, etc.to fully customize your emails.
• OLX only has one "unsubscribe" option. So when some of our alumni asked to be sent alumni obit notices and others hated the obits, it was an all-or-nothing choice, with no ability on our part to resubscribe an individual who later clarified he only wanted to opt out of one type of message. In Mailchimp, you can create any number of public groups that give people full options what type of communications they prefer. I believe that BB is working to add this feature, but it's still in pilot, and when we made our switch 3 years ago, we didn't want to wait.
• OLX has a one-to-one correlation. That is, each email must have a constituent record. That means that if you have a universe of online subscribers with only an email (no address, gift info, etc.) then in OLX you are stuck either adding hundreds of un-mailable constituent records into RE, or what I believe some people do (which of course affects your NXT pricing tier); load a couple hundred emails all onto one record (which destroys your response tracking); or employ a secondary subscription from Omatic to manage your excess email records. With Mailchimp, you can create one Group for your RE list and another Group for your online-only followers, and that's that.

As far as Chimpegration, we tried it. The integration mapping was bulky and in my opinion, it took just as much work mapping the connections and keeping the process current, as it does just to manually export from Mailchimp and Import into RE (and vice-versa). It also had some clunkiness in two-way communication with regards to opt-outs and deceased removals, if I remember. So we just dropped the subscription when we transitioned to NXT. The one feature I do kind of miss from Chimpegration was there was a small box on the RE constituent records where you could open up and see each donor's response to each email, at a glance. But it wasn't worth keeping the subscription for that one nifty feature.