School Districts with more than one domain

[gcruzpifano]

We work with school districts across the company. We use their domain to associate contacts to companies. Over the course of doing business with them, we've realized that many districts have secondary domains that they use for email that can be different from their website domain. When a contact writes to us from one of those secondary domains, a new company is created and then we manually have to check whether the intended company already exists and then merge. This is not a sustainable workflow for us. I'm curious if others have encountered this problem and how they've solved it.

[DHoney]

Yep — we’ve run into this exact same issue working with K-12 districts. A lot of them have a main website domain (like districtname.k12.ca.us) but use different email domains for staff, students, or third-party platforms (like @STAFF.district.org or @Students.district.org). HubSpot’s default logic doesn’t always connect those to the same company, so duplicates happen fast.

What worked for us was setting up a custom property to store the “canonical” district domain, and then using a workflow to associate contacts with the right company, even if their email domain differs. You can also maintain a reference list of known alternate domains to match against.

As an example, LA Unified uses schoologylausd.com for their learning management system, but their staff emails often come from @lausd.net. That kind of inconsistency is exactly where the merge issues come in.

Would love to hear how others are solving this at scale — especially if there’s a more automated solution with Operations Hub or a custom integration.

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

@gcruzpifano one solution for this kind of situation I've used is parent/child Companies. It still takes some manual CRM management, but it helps keep data accurate without having to merge company records. 

Thanks for the tag @MiaSrebrnjak 🙂 

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @gcruzpifano, 

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! 

I can confirm that this is expected behaviour if the setting that automatically associates companies to contacts is on. 

I wanted to ask a couple of subject matter experts for their input: 

Hi @danmoyle, @BukunmiOdetayo, @StjepanGrcic, do you have any best practice tips for @gcruzpifano? Thank you!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team