Migrate from Centerbase to Mailchimp

Mailchimp's contact-status model diverges from Centerbase's active/inactive flag

Centerbase tracks contact status as Active or Inactive, reflecting whether the client is an ongoing matter. Mailchimp uses a four-status model: Subscribed, Unsubscribed, Cleaned (hard bounce), and Non-subscribed (soft conditions). We map Active contacts with valid emails to Subscribed and inactive contacts to Non-subscribed, but contacts whose emails bounced in Centerbase's history land as Cleaned in Mailchimp — which suppresses them from sends immediately. Pre-migration email validation is strongly recommended before the import runs to avoid losing deliverable contacts to Cleaned status.

Matter-based contact deduplication produces different subscriber counts

Centerbase allows the same contact to appear across multiple matters — a client named 'Jane Smith' may be the primary contact on Matter A and a witness on Matter B. Mailchimp deduplicates subscribers by email address. If Jane Smith has one email address across both matters, she becomes one Mailchimp subscriber regardless of how many Centerbase matter records reference her. We surface all duplicate-email contacts in a pre-migration deduplication report so your team can decide whether to merge matter-specific notes or tags before import.

Mailchimp's merge field 10-character tag limit truncates Centerbase field names

Mailchimp requires merge field tags to be uppercase, 10 characters or fewer, and letters/numbers only. Centerbase custom property names can be 40+ characters with spaces and underscores. We auto-generate short tags (e.g., MATTER_NAM for 'Matter Name', BILLRATE for 'Billing Rate') and produce a mapping table in the migration plan so you know exactly which merge field contains which original Centerbase data. Merge field long names can be human-readable in Mailchimp's UI even if the tag is truncated.

Mailchimp's audience-per-account model differs from Centerbase's multi-matter structure

Centerbase organizes contacts by matter — a firm with 200 active matters has contacts distributed across 200 matter contexts. Mailchimp organizes contacts into audiences, and best practice is to maintain one audience per account to avoid double-counting contacts toward your plan limit. We load all contacts into a single primary audience and use tags derived from matter type and contact role to simulate the matter-based segmentation. If you need separate audiences (e.g., clients vs. opposing parties), we can split the import but you must manage multiple audience counts toward Mailchimp's pricing.

Unsubscribe and compliance data from Centerbase requires manual export preparation

Centerbase does not natively track email consent or unsubscribe requests within the contact record the way Mailchimp requires. If your firm has ever sent external emails directly from Centerbase (e.g., client newsletters or firm updates) and some recipients unsubscribed, those addresses need to be added to Mailchimp's suppression list before the migration import runs. We can include a suppression-list upload step in the migration plan if you provide the unsubscribed address list, but Centerbase does not expose a native unsubscribe-tracking export.