HubSpot for a nonprofit - Donation history?

[NorberDR]

Hello everyone,

I'm considering to use HubSpot CRM (and the whole marketing package afterwards) for my non-profit.

I've been searching in this forum the reply to my question but the most similar thing I found was one titled "Using deals for nonprofits", which is not totally helpful.

Moreover, looking at this post by the HubSpot Academy I miss the concept I'm asking here (title of the post: What are some suggested contact properties that I can create for my non-profit organization?)

We're a nonprofit funded mostly by individuals who give small-medium donations (5-150 euros each donation). Therefore, we receive lots of donations every month.

I want to know if HubSpot CRM is able to give the list of donations that a donor has given over time, with at least the date and amount for each of them (as Salesforce does).

E.g. Donor John Smith: donation 1: 04/06/2016 - 25,00€; donation 2: 23/12/2016 - 25,00€; donation 3: 11/05/2017 - 35,00€...

From the question that I linked above I assume that HubSpot doesn't have calculation capacity to sum all the donations. Okay. But a list of all the donor's gifts can be created or the latest donation overwrites the previous one?

And most importantly, if I can do it, how? I'm a bit confused with the CRM terminology because of, on the one hand, I have to translate the English terms of the Community and Academy posts into Spanish, and on the other hand, because I have to translate them into a nonprofit "language".

Thank you very much

[bradmin · Accepted solution]

Hi, @NorberDR. The short answer is that there's no built-in functionality for what you're describing, and while some solutions exist - like that help article you linked - they're not as robust as other providers you mentioned. 

The reason Salesforce works so well for nonprofits is because they've explicitly built out objects in their schema which are designed specifically for nonprofits. With HubSpot, you have a much more streamlined schema: contacts, companies, deals, and engagements (or tasks, which can be associated with any of the other objects).

Any time your organization has a model or use case which has a need for a specific schema which doesn't fit neatly into those objects, it then becomes an exercise of using the other objects in a way that emulates the object you want. Here, you could probably come up with some sort of task-based solution to represent donation history of contacts. 

There may be others here who can communicate their experience, too. I recommend getting in touch with a HubSpot salesperson, describing your situation, and requesting a sales engineer. HubSpot has a team of engineers that help prospects like yourself talk about your goals, then discuss how the system might be designed to help you achieve them. The salesperson you speak with may also have references available to speak with, as well. But I strongly recommend requesting a sales engineer. 

[NorberDR]

Thank you @bradmin for your fast and detailed reply.

Following you advise I'm playing with deals and contacts, and it looks like I found a solution. There's another problem I hadn't thought about: deals cannot be imported and automatically associated to contacts. But I'll try to solve this.

I'll contact HubSpot experts for further consulting.

Thank you!

[bradmin]

You'll have a way around this if you're using Salesforce, and have it connected to your HubSpot products. Turn on opportunity sync, then import all contacts associated with opportunities in Salesforce (must be associated through opportunity contact roles). This contact import would bring in all contacts, and any associated company or opportunity info from Salesforce. 

Without that, the team at HubSpot may have some solutions available with Zapier or other integrations, depending on where your data is stored.

[NorberDR]

Actually I'm just considering different options, I've got no CRM software yet.

As you say, I'm playing with Zapier to build integrations and it's quite easy for the new deals. However, importing all the deals we already have in our database implies tens of thousands of Zapier tasks, and this is too much to our Zapier plan.

[bradmin]

Okay, thanks for clarifying.  If you're having conversations with sales engineers, I'm sure this is a plan you're reviewing with them, but make sure they understand what would be involved with this import. I'm sure they can suggest some solutions as to how this could be accomplish - alternately, it may be the kind of work you'd prefer having a third party complete, and that team can still make recommendations to providers. 

Best of luck. 

[brymichaelson]

Hi there, it seems I am having the same issues as you - could you give me any advise on how you are uploading deals into Hubspot? I am trying to do it with Zapier from an Excel sheet but can't figure it out. Thanks!

[NorberDR · Accepted solution]

Hi @brymichaelson,

For new donations I'm using a Zap with these steps:

New donation (Give Wordpress Plugin) > Create or update contact (HubSpot CRM) > Delay for 1 minute > Find contact (HubSpot CRM) > Create deal (HubSpot CRM).

That is, when a new donation takes place, the system looks for the donor in the CRM. If he exists, after one minute it finds it and then create a deal for him. If he doesn't exist, before finding him, the system creates him.

In your case, instead of using Give Wordpress Plugin for step 1 you should create a spreadsheet in Google Sheets, for example, and set the trigger when a new row is created. Then, you should ask HubSpot CRM to create or update contact, etc.

The fields for every step depend on how you're doing it, which kind of data you have (and you want), etc. Be careful with dates, I have several problems. The format of HubSpot dates is very specific and all collected dates have to be in that format so that HubSpot admits them. Use "Formatter by Zapier" to change the format (see their Docs about it, it's very easy).

I hope this helps you.

Best regards,