How LCRF Grew a Healthy Email List and Saved Hours with Popup Forms

In the past, coding emails from scratch in HTML was the norm. But now? Building emails shouldn't be that hard or time consuming.

That’s what was happening at the Lung Cancer Research Foundation (LCRF), a nonprofit working toward a world free of lung cancer by funding studies for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and cure of the disease. The organization serves anyone committed to improving outcomes for those affected by the world’s leading cause of cancer death.

But they were being held back by an email platform built for a different era.

Aine Calgaro, who creates nearly all of the marketing materials for the LCRF, found herself hand-coding emails in raw HTML to ensure they displayed properly on mobile devices. The system they were using didn’t offer meaningful analytics to gauge what resonated with supporters. Website forms were clunky and unreliable, driving few organic signups.

“We had very few people visit the website and say, ‘Hey, I want to subscribe,’” says Aine, Digital Marketing Specialist at LCRF. “The signups we got were because people signed up for an event and we added them, or they made a donation.”

After migrating to Intuit Mailchimp in fall 2024, the foundation partnered with their Customer Success Manager (CSM) to transform their email strategy and  build a healthier, more robust and engaged audience while freeing up time to focus on their mission.

The challenge: Outdated tools limiting growth and insight

LCRF’s old email system created obstacles at every turn. The interface, which Aine describes as “really from the ‘90s,” forced the team into workarounds that consumed time and limited what they could accomplish.

Aine had to create everything in HTML view because the WYSIWYG editor would break her responsive designs.

“Just because I know how to code doesn’t mean I want to,” Aine says. “Thank goodness I have some ancient knowledge of computer science from back in the ‘80s. Not everybody who is hired to do what I do would have had that knowledge.”

Limitations extended beyond email. Evan Bonsett-Veal, the other half of LCRF’s marketing team who manages the foundation’s database, had worked with their email platform for 9 years and struggled with basic data management. The system lacked modern API connectivity, making it difficult to integrate with other tools or automate data flows. 

When LCRF approached the company to request feature improvements, the answer was typically that it wasn’t possible or that it would be prohibitively expensive to implement.

Website forms were another pain point. To embed a form on the LCRF site, the team had to manually input code. The forms assigned invisible passwords to users, creating a confusing experience that often displayed ugly error pages when people  attempted to log in.

Most frustrating, though, was the lack of actionable data.

“It was really not useful at all to try to figure out whether something was successful,” Aine says.

And for Evan, the manual nature of everything meant he couldn’t take vacation without worrying about email workflows.

“There wasn’t really any opportunity for any sort of automation,” Evan says. “It could even affect things like when you could be out of the office or not because you have to import these lists to make sure a welcome series, for example, is updated.”

The tools: Forms, automation, and open API

The support LCRF received from their CSM has felt like a staffing multiplier for a 2-person marketing team that can now do more with their email program than ever.

Their CSM proactively brought new features to their attention, enabling them to adopt them quickly. This would have required expensive consulting on their previous platform.

“I feel like [Mailchimp] has been a good extension of what we do,” Aine says. “We’re a very small staff. We have fewer than 20 employees for the whole foundation. It means a lot when I can say that a vendor can be an extension of our staff.”

Aine adds, “I personally could not believe how much service you guys offered us at no added cost. Normally, we would have had to pay big bucks for services like that. It means a lot when a vendor can truly be an extension of our staff.”

LCRF benefited from Mailchimp’s account audit program with their CSM, who helped them analyze click rates and provide strategic recommendations. Aine says she shared the results with her supervisor, who immediately recognized the value.

They also  replaced their outdated website forms with 6 new targeted ones after migrating their contacts to Mailchimp. These forms enabled the foundation to ask visitors about their personal connection to lung cancer and what kind of communications they wanted to receive—updates on volunteer opportunities and advocacy to grant information for researchers, news about events, and more.

“To be able to use natural language, be able to ask them their connection to lung cancer, that’s golden,” Aine says. “We never had that before.”

Almost 30,000 site visitors have viewed the new forms since they were implemented.

Mailchimp’s open API eliminated the data management issues that consumed so much of Evan’s time each week. Data now flows automatically into Mailchimp, and LCRF launched a new welcome journey using a marketing automation flow that’s onboarded 2,000 new subscribers.

“Having everything flow naturally the way we want it after initial setup, and then being able to automate specific emails to go in and look at specific groups based on the created date,” Evan says, “we know it’s hitting the right people. We’re seeing that in the results and the analytics.”

For Aine, Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop email builder ended the hand-coding era. The platform ensures emails render correctly across devices and includes pre-send audits that catch missing links or images. The analytics dashboard provides reliable data LCRF can share with their board.

“It’s so much more pleasant to put together an email,” Aine says. “I actually enjoy going in and working on an email because it’s so simple.”

The results: Higher open rates and opt-ins, healthier lists, and time saved

By removing unengaged contacts and focusing on quality, the foundation went from 159,000 subscribers at migration to a more active list of 91,000. Email opt-ins jumped 5.86% after implementing the new Mailchimp forms, with the 6 targeted forms capturing more qualified subscribers.

Open rates climbed from 20.33% before migration to 28.13% after working with their CSM to strategically clean up unengaged subscribers. This, paired with segmentation, reflects that relevant content is now reaching the right audience. 

In fact, the welcome email flow has onboarded 2,000 new subscribers since launch.

Automation eliminated 3-5 hours of manual work each week for Evan, time he previously spent pulling reports, importing lists and refreshing data. That adds up to more than 4 full work weeks over a year.

“We have a lot more confidence in the data that’s going in and the segmentation than we had in the past,” he says.

For other nonprofits considering switching to Mailchimp, Evan said to not overlook the value of having dedicated support.

“You’re really not going to find a lot of better solutions out there in the market, if any,” Evan says. “The collaboration with Mailchimp to get us off the ground and moving in the right direction was a tremendous help. I don’t think you’re going to find those opportunities out there in the market with other solutions.”