Drag-n-drop and API export instead of hard-coding every email: How HelloAsso built a bridge between design and code

Creating millions of emails that are visually engaging yet consistent is no small feat, especially when every template requires a developer’s time. That’s why Stripo is committed to empowering teams to design, refine, and launch emails without getting stuck in code.

In this case study, HelloAsso — the leading web platform for French nonprofits, with over 20 million contacts and more than 3 million emails sent every month — shares how Stripo allowed them to move away from hard-coding every email template. By combining drag-n-drop design and API export, their marketing and communication teams can now create, update, and approve emails on their own while still keeping designs consistent and on brand.

Expert

Gawen Mercier

Marketing Team Manager, HelloAsso

Meet the company

HelloAsso is the leading web platform for French nonprofits. It operates on the belief that associative engagement is an essential driver of a society built on cooperation and kindness. Its mission is to make civic engagement a social norm by supporting the nonprofit sector’s growth with free digital tools. These tools help organizations mobilize their communities and collect payments easily while removing technical and financial barriers so that associations can focus on their social impact.

Challenge: Make email production more flexible and autonomous

Email communication plays a central role in how HelloAsso delivers on its mission. 

As a SaaS platform, it uses email to support the following areas:

• onboarding and product adoption: Email guides nonprofits through digital tools, ensuring that they can easily set up campaigns and 'get better results;
• operational reliability: Email is essential for delivering transactional messages, such as payment confirmations and tax receipts. This automation saves time for volunteers, allowing them to focus on core activities;
• community engagement: Email makes it possible to share best practices and inspire subscribers, showing how digital tools are levers for building stronger social ties.

This meant that even small copy updates or visual tweaks required developer involvement and product-team prioritization. As a result, updates were slow and everyday changes were harder than they should have been.

Over time, this setup created a growing technical debt in email communication. The templates no longer reflected HelloAsso’s evolving brand, and the team lacked the flexibility to update emails based on recipient feedback or new product features. Marketing and communication teams could not work independently or optimize emails in real time. HelloAsso needed a way to separate design from development and give content teams full ownership of email creation.

Undoubtedly, transactional emails were our greatest challenge. While newsletters or event invitations were relatively manageable, anything linked to our core product (like automated payment confirmations or tax receipts) required developer time.

Gawen Mercier,

Marketing Team Manager HelloAsso.

The following example shows a transactional email with multiple merge tags, which requires perfect export to the email system and a reliable database connection.

(Source: Email by HelloAsso)

Solution: Finding an email builder that works for both technical and nontechnical teams

HelloAsso discovered Stripo through a Google search while looking for an email design tool that offered ready-to-use HTML templates and worked smoothly with its existing technical setup. The team needed something developers could rely on but that marketing and communication specialists could also use comfortably.

After extensive testing of the free version, Stripo stood out for several reasons:

1. Design flexibility: The drag-n-drop editor let nontechnical users build complex layouts and personalized emails without coding. 
2. Seamless integration: API integration allowed Stripo to connect directly to HelloAsso’s proprietary transactional email system, closing the gap between design and production. 
3. Cost-effectiveness: Pricing was also an important factor, and Stripo offered an affordable option that met the needs of a mission-driven nonprofit organization.

(Source: Email by HelloAsso)

Workflow: How HelloAsso builds and scales email communication

HelloAsso communicates with a broad, diverse audience involved in the nonprofit sector, including members of local sports clubs, cultural communities, and donors supporting various social causes. 

Most emails created with Stripo are transactional, triggered by subscriber actions such as membership renewals, event registrations, donations, or solidarity purchases. These messages represent the most crucial touchpoints in HelloAsso’s user journey. With a database of over 20 million contacts and more than 3 million emails sent monthly, the team depends on a process that guarantees reliability, automation, and consistent design across all communications.

Stripo has reorganized the team’s internal email production. Marketing and communication teams now fully control email designs, without depending on developers to hard-code templates.

Here’s what the email creation workflow looks like now:

• a graphic designer creates base templates in Stripo using the drag-n-drop editor; 
• a content marketer adapts these templates for each new email; 
• the team shares a preview link with the brand manager, marketing manager, and product marketing manager for approval; 
• once approved, the templates are synced to HelloAsso’s proprietary system through the Stripo API, which manages automated sending at scale.

The most important combination of Stripo features for us is the drag-n-drop builder coupled with API connectivity. We use saved blocks for recurring content, which is necessary for ensuring consistency across all our emails and saving time by reusing elements such as headers, footers, and legal disclaimers.

Gawen Mercier,

Marketing Team Manager HelloAsso.

Results and impact: Faster, better, and more flexible email production

Since adopting Stripo, HelloAsso has seen clear improvements in several main areas of its email communications, including faster execution and improved daily teamwork.

(Source: Email by HelloAsso)

Key results of using Stripo:

• faster, more flexible updates: Email templates are now easy to adjust. What once felt outdated now looks modern and professional. Simple changes — such as adding a temporary block to promote Giving Tuesday — can be done in about five minutes. Before Stripo, even small updates caused friction and slowed the entire team down;
• better design quality: Emails are easier to refresh and keep consistent with the brand. This has made day-to-day communication cleaner and more visually polished without relying on developer support for every change;
• more agility for marketing teams: The biggest shift is internal fluidity. Stripo removed technical barriers that had previously blocked any improvements. This not only saved time, but also made it possible to try things that simply weren’t possible before;
• stronger onboarding and product adoption: Onboarding and welcome emails are good examples. Building these emails in Stripo helped create a cleaner, more engaging customer journey. This has significantly improved product adoption and helped every new association feel supported from the first interaction.

The real “wow” moment was testing the API connection. Seeing that we could design a custom email, export the HTML via the API, and have it interpreted perfectly by our database was a revelation. Being able to insert variables like [first_name] directly into the Stripo editor and see them rendered correctly by our proprietary system at the moment of sending was the proof we needed. We had finally built a bridge between design and code.

Gawen Mercier,

Marketing Team Manager HelloAsso.

Wrapping up

By adopting Stripo, HelloAsso turned email from a technical constraint into a flexible and reliable communication channel. The team now owns email design, maintains consistency more easily, and has the flexibility needed to support millions of customers at scale. As a result, HelloAsso can keep its emails modern, relevant, and helpful, ensuring that every non-profit it supports gets clear guidance and a better experience at each step of the journey.