Compile and check the email

• Mailchimp → Campaigns → “Replicate” (under “View Report” dropdown menu) the most recent “… Events via Portal” campaign
• Rename to correct Year, Month and remove “(copy 01)” from title
• Confirm “To” is “1 recipient” (your, or whoever is testing this for you)
• Edit subject’s emoji, month, year
• Edit “Email Link” to remove junky suffix hash, simplify like “2025-june-events-general”
• Click “Edit Design” on preview panel to right
• approve submitted events on form responses sheet (private)
• scoop up non-submitted items from other newsletters, Eddington marketing site, Storey’s Field Centre
• get html from this page for full calendar and feature snippets of your choice.
• add Portal notices, provided in advance by Irene if you remind her.
• Send Mailchimp’s “Preview” to yourself and then forward to a hardy crew of eagle-eyed testers.

Compile the email

• Send the campaign to yourself only (not via Mailchimp’s “Preview” - the links in those are temporary)
• Get the raw version of this email (in Gmail hit “…” top right and “Show Original”, Ctrl+a, Ctrl+c the whole of the new window)
• Paste into “Raw mailchimp output to Resisense input re-formatter” below
• Hit “Reformat” button then copy output from second box
• Paste into text editor and save as “newsletter-[month]-test.txt”
• Email to Irene @ Portal Irene.Wong@admin.cam.ac.uk and ask her to do a test-send via ResiSense, attaching the .txt file you just saved and specifying the subject “TEST [The actual subject from Mailchimp]” and specifying to send only to you.
• If there’s an issue with the message when Irene sends it to you through ResiSense (or you want to edit or add content) you have to do it in this file, else start again from the top of this list.
• If the email from Irene looks good, ask her to do a general send, attaching “newsletter-[month]-final.txt”, specifying the non-test subject and that it’s to go to everyone

Prepare the non-Portal version of the email

• Replicate the above campaign
• Rename it to “[Year] [Month] Events via Mailchimp”
• Change the “To” section to “Segments” → “Newsletter Subscribers”
• Edit “Email Link” to remove junky suffix hash, simplify like “[YEAR]-[MONTH]-events-subscribers”
• Click “Edit Design”
• Replace the contents of the top grey box with the following raw html (hit “<>” button to edit):

• Delete the grey header bar for Portal Notices and the following box section where the notices live (these are not relevant to non-Portal subscribers)
• Once Irene has sent out the email to all residents on the Resisense list, send this second campaign to the ERA Mailchimp subscribers.

Working around MailChimp sending limits

Since Feb 2026 MailChimp has limited our free account’s Audience number to 250. This caps how many recipients a campaign can have to 250 max. The workaround is as follows:

• The oldest ~200 contacts in our audience have a Tag “SendChunk2”. These are the most likely people to either be on Portal’s list or to have left Eddington and just not unsubscribed.
• Go to the Audience page and find Archive under the three-dot menu top right.
• Unarchive everyone
• Filter all contacts with the “SendChunk2” tag and archive them.
• Under “Advanced Filters” build a segment based on “What type of emails you would like to receive?”. The filter phrase should read What type of email would you like to receive? - none of - All messages except monthly newsletter
• Select the top checkbox in the results table then where it says “100 contacts on this page selected.” click the adjacent “Select all [number] contacts”.
• Tag these as “SendChunk1” (this merges our newest subscribers into the chunk we’re about to send)
• Open your campaign and edit the name to add an “ A” suffix (e.g. “2026 April Events via MailChimp A”)
• Under “Send to” section choose “+ Target Segment” and filter on Tag to make the phrase Tags - contact is tagged - SendChunk1
• Send this campaign.
• Go to the Audience Archive and unarchive all contacts
• Filter for all contacts without the tag “SendChunk2” and archive them
• Replicate the campaign, suffix it “ B”.
• Filter recipients as those with tag SendChunk2 who also do not have tag SendChunkOne and haven’t opted out of newsletters. The resulting filters should read: Tags - contact is tagged - SendChunk2 AND Tags - contact is not tagged - SendChunk1 AND What type of email would you like to receive? - none of - All messages except monthly newsletter.
• As of April 2026 the daily sending limit on free account has been reduced from 500 to 250 in any day. As such you’ll get a warning that this second campaign can’t be sent. Wait 24 hours and it should work.