Make Your Mailchimp Lists GDPR Compliant with All-in-One GDPR

Ideea
3 min readJan 10, 2018

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1. The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay — Article 17

The Problem

Under Article 17: Right to erasure, you must allow data subjects to request that any data your organisation possesses on that individual to be erased. But the subject’s data could be in many different places and be stored using many different third-party services. So to make the erasure process as easy as possible the All-in-One GDPR WordPress plugin comes with the shortcode [unsubscribe_form].

TL;DR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xn6w658zaI

Step 1: API Key

To integrate All-in-One GDPR with Mailchimp you will first need to get an API key (Mailchimp Documentation: API Keys). This will allow the plugin to communicate with your Mailchimp account without you having to supply your accounts’ email and password.

You can get an API key by going to your accounts page, hovering over the dropdown named ‘Extras’ and then clicking on API keys from the menu.

Login -> Account -> Extras -> API Keys

Step 2: Add the key

Now, copy the API key provided by Mailchimp and paste it into the field titled Mailchimp API key on the integrations tab of the All-in-One GDPR Plugin. Then click the blue button ‘save changes’.

Step 3: The Shortcode

Next, in the admin section of WordPress, make a new page titled ‘Unsubscribe’ and add the shortcode [unsubscribe_form] into the content editor. When you publish the page and navigate to it on the front-end you should see the following form.

Shortcode: [unsubscribe_form]

Test

It’s as simple as that, your site is now integrated with Mailchimp. As shown in the video above (1:38), you can manually add an email address to your Mailchimp list, type that email into the unsubscribe form and then click the ‘unsubscribe user’ button in the admin section to test everything is working correctly. After you click the ‘unsubscribe user’ button you should be able to go to your Mailchimp list and see that the user has been removed from all of your lists.

All-in-One GDPR Plugin

Download The Plugin

The plugin is currently available for download at Ideea.co.uk/All-in-One-GDPR. The plugin comes with SAR functionality, API, consent management tools out of the box.

Please contact me if you have any feedback or feature requests.

You can connect with me at anthonybudd@ideea.co.uk, GitHub and Linkedin

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