Case Study
The Minnesota
Historical Society
How one of the nation’s leading historical institutions unified 26 sites, 5 systems, and thousands of visitors under one connected CRM.
Modern Tools for a Mission Rooted in History
Founded in 1849, the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) operates 26 historic sites and museums across the state. As one of the largest and most complex cultural organizations in the Midwest, MNHS manages everything from ticketed experiences and educational programs to membership, donations, and historical preservation efforts.
Over the years, their technology stack evolved organically. Different teams adopted different systems for ticketing, membership, email marketing, and reporting. Tessitura served as the operational backbone, but its rigidity and the growing number of external tools around it left staff juggling disjointed systems and duplicative workflows.
Institution at a Glance
🏛️
Founded
1849
📍
Scope
26 Sites
👥
Staff
500+
🎫
Annual Visitors
1.2M
One Vision, Many Systems
MNHS reached a breaking point with data fragmentation and manual effort. Their teams needed to understand their audiences holistically: who visited, donated, subscribed, or attended events...and to act on that insight in real time. But their systems didn’t talk to each other.
Tessitura held ticketing data, while events were managed separately in other tools like Shopify and WordPress. Every transaction required someone to manually export, clean, and re-import data across systems. Membership renewals, acknowledgements, and donor reports often involved late-night reconciliations and spreadsheet gymnastics.
The Legacy Stack
🎟️ Tessitura
🛍️ Shopify
🌐 Drupal
👥 VolunteerHub
📊 Excel
Because Tessitura couldn’t sync natively with other systems, MNHS lacked visibility into critical metrics such as which members attended events, how ticket sales impacted membership renewals, or what cumulative engagement looked like across sites. Even basic reporting like daily revenue summaries or audience segmentation for campaigns was delayed and inconsistent.
This inefficiency compounded over time:
- • Duplicate data entry across ticketing, membership, and finance systems created inconsistencies and delays.
- • Flat-file imports and exports between Tessitura and the ERP introduced manual errors and slowed financial reconciliation.
- • Disjointed reporting meant leadership never had real-time visibility into sales, attendance, or membership health.
- • Staff capacity was stretched thin by nightly reporting and repetitive administrative work.
Ultimately, the organization needed more than a CRM migration. It needed a rethinking of how data flowed between its programs, departments, and visitor experiences.
Why MuseumHub Was the Right Solution
When MNHS began evaluating solutions, the goal wasn’t just to replace Tessitura, it was to unify their audience data in a modern, flexible system that staff could actually use. HubSpot offered the foundation: a powerful CRM, marketing automation, and reporting engine. But museum operations have unique complexities. Tiered memberships, multi-site ticketing, variable benefits, and more. All things that standard CRMs don’t handle natively.
That’s where MuseumHub came in. Built on HubSpot, MuseumHub added the logic needed to manage ticketing, memberships, and donor engagement in one connected platform without custom code or nightly imports. It gave MNHS:
✓
A single system where every constituent interaction, from a ticket purchase to a donation, was captured in real time.
✓
Automated workflows for renewals, acknowledgements, and financial reconciliation.
✓
Unified dashboards showing daily revenue, attendance, and membership trends.
The Architecture of a Unified Institution
The result was not just a smoother tech stack, but a cultural shift. Staff could finally focus on engagement and programming, not data wrangling. And leadership could make decisions with confidence, backed by live insights rather than yesterday’s exports.
With MuseumHub layered on HubSpot, MNHS didn’t just migrate systems, the organization completely restructured how its teams operate day to day. What had once been siloed across departments and disconnected tools became a single ecosystem where visitor, member, and donor data all live in one place.
That shift touched every part of the organization: how tickets and memberships are managed, how revenue is tracked, how staff communicate with audiences, and how leadership plans for the future.
Below, let’s look at how MNHS approached its transformation, starting with ticketing and membership as the foundation, expanding into development and engagement, and building toward integrated analytics, smarter systems, and the next phase of operational growth.
Ticketing & Memberships
Before partnering with Nonprofit Tech Shop, MNHS managed ticketing and memberships across two separate systems: Tessitura handled online transactions, while Shopify powered in-person sales. Neither system spoke to the other. Staff had to manually export data, reconcile purchases, and update member lists across platforms. This meant delays, data mismatches, and long nights of spreadsheet cleanup.
MuseumHub solved that by unifying ticketing and membership management directly inside HubSpot. Built to handle the complex realities of museums - everything from general admission to timed ticketing, field trips, and private events - MuseumHub made it possible for MNHS to manage their entire visitor flow from one system.
Today, HubSpot acts as the source of truth for all ticketing and membership data. Shopify continues to serve as the point-of-sale system at box offices, but it’s now fully synced with HubSpot in real time. When a visitor purchases a ticket online, the inventory instantly updates at the physical site, and vice versa. Staff can see every purchase, attendance record, and membership interaction in one place, with no manual uploads or overnight syncs.
💻
Online Sales
↔
Hub
↔
🛍️
POS
That real-time connection changed everything for front-line and back-office teams alike.
- If a visitor buys a ticket online and later decides to become a member, staff can credit the ticket purchase toward the membership immediately, right at the box office.
- If a member forgets their card, staff can look up their record in HubSpot in seconds and scan their admission.
- Attendance tracking, once managed through printed door lists, now happens via a simple scan, giving MNHS visibility into who actually visits…and who books but doesn’t show.
That last point is especially powerful. With MuseumHub, MNHS can now spot trends such as recurring no-shows for timed events or underused member benefits, helping them reclaim potential lost revenue and design better engagement strategies.
Behind the scenes, MuseumHub’s modular design means MNHS can grow without friction. The ticketing module handles multiple event types: public, private, timed, or series-based - and can adapt to complex pricing rules like member discounts or group rates. And because it lives natively inside HubSpot, staff aren’t switching tools or juggling separate logins. They’re simply using one system that does it all, reliably and in real time.
Development & Revenue Expansion
For most museums and historical institutions, ticketing and memberships are the heartbeat of day-to-day revenue. But they’re also transactional by nature. Someone buys a ticket, attends a program, or upgrades to a family membership. At MNHS, with 26 historic sites across the state, those interactions happen constantly, generating a steady stream of visitors and members.
But the organization also relies on a much smaller group of major members and donors - supporters who give significantly more through upper-tier memberships like the North Star Circle or through planned gifts. Managing and nurturing those relationships required more than a checkout form. It demanded a connected system that allowed the advancement and marketing teams to work together seamlessly.
Previously, these high-value relationships were managed in Tessitura, but the system’s closed architecture made it almost impossible to automate or share that data in real time. Staff manually exported donor and membership data into HubSpot for email and campaign management, creating constant delays and breaking the feedback loop between departments. Even basic acknowledgements or membership card mailings required manual coordination.
Now, with HubSpot and MuseumHub working together, MNHS can track and act on every donor and member interaction inside one ecosystem. The advancement tasks of renewal reminders, stewardship outreach, or special invitations are all automated based on a member’s history, tenure, and giving level. Workflows route follow-up steps automatically, ensuring that no opportunity or relationship falls through the cracks.
This unified approach delivers several key benefits:
- ● Automated stewardship workflows ensure timely renewals, acknowledgements, and personalized engagement without manual handoffs.
- ● Development and marketing teams share live data, allowing for coordinated campaigns and consistent messaging across departments.
- ● Comprehensive revenue tracking brings all giving, from entry-level memberships to major donations, into one reporting system. And importantly, it eliminates the need for outside tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Snowflake.
For MNHS, this shift was transformative. What once required multiple systems and manual imports now happens automatically inside HubSpot. The result was not just more efficiency, but a clearer picture of every constituent’s relationship with the organization, from their first ticket purchase to their long-term support as a member or donor.
Marketing & Engagement
For MNHS, marketing used to be an exercise in guesswork. Campaigns were running, but they were fueled by partial data. Email lists exported from Tessitura were always stale.
With MuseumHub built on HubSpot, that changed completely. Every visitor, member, and donor interaction now lives in one connected system: ticket purchases, event attendance, donations, email engagement, even ad and social touchpoints. Marketing automation isn’t just sending emails anymore; it’s orchestrating personalized, multi-channel engagement that reflects each individual’s real behavior.
HubSpot’s native marketing tools power the engine, while MuseumHub provides the connective tissue that brings museum-specific data into the mix. MNHS can now:
🎯
Segment Audiences
By lifecycle stage, visit history, membership tier, and engagement level.
🤖
Automate Messaging
Across email, SMS, ads, and social channels, all informed by the same dataset.
🎨
Personalize Experiences
In login portals, landing pages, and email templates, driven by AI-enhanced recommendations.
📈
Measure Attribution
From every touch, whether it’s a ticket scan, a donation, a social share, or a phone call. All within one reporting environment.
The result is a marketing ecosystem that feels human. Staff can see that a member attended a lecture last month, donated this week, and opened a campaign email yesterday. And then they can tailor the next interaction accordingly.
For MNHS, this level of integration was the final missing piece. It eliminated the need for costly data warehouses like Snowflake or visualization layers like Tableau just to connect the dots. Now, the entire audience journey can be viewed, analyzed, and acted on directly inside HubSpot.
Integrations
One of the most powerful aspects of MuseumHub is how seamlessly it extends into a museum’s broader tech stack. Because MuseumHub lives natively inside HubSpot, its flexibility mirrors HubSpot’s own. This means it can connect with virtually any modern system that supports open APIs or data exchange.
For MNHS, this was essential. Their existing operations relied on Shopify for point-of-sale transactions, VolunteerHub for volunteer scheduling and management, and iWave for donor research and wealth insights. Instead of replacing those tools outright, MNHS used MuseumHub’s integration framework to connect them. The result: one central system where data flows freely between platforms that previously operated in isolation.
Two types of integrations drove this transformation:
1. Core operational integrations.
These are the systems that power daily functions: ticketing, membership, volunteer management, and constituent tracking. For MNHS, the priority was ensuring that ticket sales and membership data from Shopify synced live with HubSpot and MuseumHub, while volunteer data from VolunteerHub enriched contact and household records. Every ticket purchase, volunteer activity, or membership renewal is now visible across teams in real time.
2. Strategic and engagement integrations.
The second lens focuses on tools that make day-to-day work easier or deepen audience relationships. Because MuseumHub is built on HubSpot, the world’s second-largest CRM, MNHS can now plug in thousands of third-party tools directly from the HubSpot App Marketplace. This includes integrations for Slack or Microsoft Teams notifications, calling and SMS tools that log every interaction automatically, and even custom connectors to sync government relations data or advocacy actions into HubSpot.
This flexibility has been especially valuable for MNHS’s advancement team. Wealth screening data from iWave, for example, now flows directly into donor and household profiles, helping prioritize outreach and tailor campaigns without switching systems.
The bigger picture is that MNHS no longer has to choose between keeping familiar tools and gaining visibility. They can do both. MuseumHub serves as the connective layer, ensuring that no matter what system they use to sell tickets, manage volunteers, or research donors, all of it ladders up to one unified record of engagement.
Analytics & Forecasting
With everything now unified in HubSpot and MuseumHub, MNHS could finally make decisions based on live, reliable data. Ticket sales, attendance, membership renewals, and donations all update in real time without manual exports or cross-system reconciliations. Teams can see daily revenue, forecast upcoming campaigns, and spot trends across all 26 sites with a few clicks.
This operational clarity translated into measurable gains across cost, efficiency, and staff productivity.
| Area | Old Stack (Tessitura+) | HubSpot + MuseumHub |
|---|---|---|
| Annual Cost | $387K–$462K + setup | $250K–$265K |
| Integration | Separate CRM, marketing, ticketing | Unified Ecosystem |
| Ease of Use | Complex system | Intuitive, quick onboarding |
| Data Access | Delayed, static reports | Real-time dashboards |
| Productivity | Manual heavy | 30%+ lift via automation |
What MuseumHub Is (and Isn’t)
MuseumHub isn’t another standalone CRM or ticketing platform. It’s a HubSpot-powered layer built specifically for museums and cultural institutions that brings ticketing, membership, donor management, and program operations into one connected environment.
HubSpot provides the underlying CRM, marketing automation, and reporting engine. MuseumHub adds the museum-specific intelligence: tiered memberships, ticketing logic, inventory management, and program workflows. Together, they create a system that’s powerful enough for enterprise-level data management, yet intuitive enough for staff across departments to use every day.
For MNHS, that combination solved a fundamental problem: how to unify visitor engagement, fundraising, and revenue operations without forcing staff to learn a dozen new tools or lose data along the way.
What’s Next: Resource Management & Optimization
For MNHS, the next phase of its digital transformation is already underway: resource management and optimization. This part of the MuseumHub ecosystem is still in development for MNHS, but it addresses one of the most complex and universally frustrating challenges for museums and historical sites: coordinating field trips, private events, and space reservations in a way that stays connected to ticketing and visitor data.
Today, many institutions handle these activities in entirely separate tools...or worse, spreadsheets and email threads. A field-trip coordinator might manually reserve 50 tickets from the general admission pool. A private-event planner might block off a gallery or courtyard, then have to alert multiple teams that the space is no longer available for public admission. Each of those actions requires manual updates, cross-department communication, and duplicate data entry.
MuseumHub’s resource management layer changes that equation. It’s the first solution that lets organizations handle every operational scenario, from field trips to private events to space rentals, within the same unified system that manages ticketing, memberships, and donor engagement.
For MNHS, that means:
- • A field-trip module that tracks group size, payment methods, and special conditions like Title I school subsidies.
- • A private-event workflow that manages contracts, billing, staffing, and logistical needs such as A/V, tables, chairs, and security.
- • Dynamic inventory rules that automatically adjust general-admission and timed-ticket availability when a private event or field trip uses a public space.
- • Real-time website updates that reflect those changes - think blackout dates, limited access, or new event openings -across multiple sites without manual edits.
MuseumHub can even apply conditional booking logic, such as automatically approving a private event if ticket sales are below a certain threshold or requiring manual review if capacity has already been reached.
The result is a system that brings together what used to be scattered across Outlook calendars, Google Sheets, and unlinked scheduling tools. Staff can see availability across all 26 MNHS sites, promote open dates online, process requests faster, and ensure that ticketing, membership, and event data all stay in sync.
When this phase goes live, MNHS will be able to manage every public and private experience from a student field trip to a donor gala inside one platform. The payoff is both operational and cultural: less administrative friction, more revenue opportunity, and a clearer picture of how every space and program contributes to the mission.
Looking Ahead
The Minnesota Historical Society’s transformation with MuseumHub and HubSpot is a reimagining of how a cultural institution connects its people, data, and mission. What began as a project to replace an aging CRM has become a model for how museums can unify operations across ticketing, membership, fundraising, marketing, and reporting, all within one intuitive system.
As MNHS continues to expand its use of MuseumHub into field trips, private events, and broader resource management, it’s setting a new standard for what’s possible when museum operations and audience engagement finally live in the same place. For staff, that means less manual work. For visitors and members, it means more seamless, personalized experiences. And for leadership, it delivers the one thing every museum needs most: clarity.