InnerScience
Research Fund
How a nonprofit research organization unified donor, fundraising, marketing, and supporter data across five disconnected platforms to create a single source of truth in HubSpot
The Ecosystem Challenge
InnerScience Research Fund (ISRF), an organization built around conducting research on the biological and physiological effects of meditation on the human body, came to us to help simplify their tech stack, whilst retaining years worth of valuable data.
Like many growing nonprofits, ISRF’s technology ecosystem evolved organically. Donor records lived in DonorPerfect, marketing activity in ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact, customer support in Zendesk, fundraising transactions in Fundraise Up, and online purchases in WooCommerce. Each platform served a purpose, but there was little integration between them all.
As a result, donor history, marketing interactions, fundraising activity, support requests, and purchasing behavior acted as siloed data points, forcing the ISRF team to rely on manual processes, spreadsheets, and disconnected reporting to piece together a donor or supporters lifetime engagement with the organization. They had the data. The challenge was that the data lived in too many places.
One supporter, five systems
Before our engagement with ISRF, understanding a constituent's relationship with the organization required navigating five systems. A donor might contribute through Fundraise Up, receive marketing emails from ActiveCampaign, have donation records stored in DonorPerfect, and contact support through Zendesk, all super ordinary interactions and activities, but there just wasn’t a single place to see it all.
This fragmented view created challenges across the organization:
The Legacy Pain Points:
- 01 Donation history was difficult to access and report on.
- 02 Marketing teams lacked visibility into fundraising activity which hindered their ability to create contextual marketing campaigns.
- 03 Fundraising teams couldn't easily leverage engagement data from marketing campaigns.
- 04 Support interactions existed independently from donor and constituent records.
- 05 Reporting required pulling information from multiple sources and manually reconciling the results, in, you guessed it, another platform.
The fragmented data also limited the organization's ability to leverage marketing automation. Creating personalized donor journeys, lifecycle communications, and meaningful audience segmentation required data that simply wasn't connected, but ISRF were aspirational in what they wanted, and it was something we could achieve together.
Why HubSpot
ISRF wasn't looking for another system, they were looking for a CRM capable of bringing their data together so they could see their supporter ecosystem in one place. What they wanted was a solid foundation atop which they would build out their wider engagement strategies. HubSpot provided the opportunity to bring donor, fundraising, marketing, and service data together in one platform. The next step was migrating years of valuable donor history, marketing engagement, relationships, gifts, pledges, and constituent interactions from five systems while preserving the context that made that data meaningful.
Building a Single Source of Truth
To support ISRF’s vision of centralized supporter data, we worked together to design and implement a connected HubSpot ecosystem spanning fundraising, marketing, support, and reporting. Through a series of discovery workshops and architecture sessions, the Nonprofit Tech Shop team mapped existing systems, processes, and data flows to create a future-state solution that would centralize constituent information while preserving the tools and workflows ISRF relied on everyday, such as Zendesk.
A critical component of the project was consolidating years of donor, fundraising, and engagement history into HubSpot. Digital Reach migrated more than 325,000 contacts, 121,000 donation records, 8,300 pledges, over 10,000 historical activities, and thousands of engagement metrics from DonorPerfect, ActiveCampaign, and Constant Contact. Importantly, more than 1,500 unsubscribed contacts were migrated while preserving their subscription status, ensuring compliance and maintaining supporter preferences.
while preserving 1,562 unsubscribed contacts and their consent status.
The project also included the migration of marketing and engagement data from both ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact. Contact records, marketing lists, email engagement history, and audience interactions were consolidated into HubSpot, preserving years of constituent engagement data while laying the foundation for more sophisticated marketing automation and donor journeys down the road. Bringing donor, fundraising, and marketing data together in HubSpot gave teams the visibility they needed to personalize communications, improve reporting, and better understand supporter engagement.
Connecting the existing ecosystem
Migrating data into HubSpot was only part of the project. The next step was connecting the systems that continued to play an important role in day-to-day operations.
We integrated Fundraise Up, Zendesk, WooCommerce, and PayPal with HubSpot, ensuring donation activity, support interactions, purchases, and payment data remained connected to constituent records. The result was a more complete picture of supporter engagement without the need for manual imports or tedious reconciliation.
By connecting these systems, ISRF eliminated the need for manual exports, spreadsheet reconciliations, and duplicate data entry. Fundraising, marketing, service, and commerce teams now could work from the same data, reducing manual effort and improving visibility across the organization.
Unlocking the Power of Marketing Automation
With supporter data consolidated in HubSpot, ISRF could finally take advantage of the capabilities available within HubSpot’s Marketing Hub. It gave ISRF the ability to:
- Build sophisticated donor journeys
- Segment audiences based on behaviour and engagement
- Automate lifecycle communications
- Personalize supporter experiences
- Trigger communications based on fundraising activity
- Measure campaign performance and attribution from a single platform
What was previously spread across multiple systems now lives in one platform. Rather than moving data between tools, the team can focus on building stronger relationships with supporters.
Building for Adoption, Not Just Implementation
Beyond implementation and migration, the engagement included enablement training, solution-based training sessions, creating easy to follow documentation, weekly check-ins, data architecture walkthroughs, and strategic consulting support. This ensured the team had the knowledge and confidence to adopt HubSpot successfully from day one.
A migration of this scale is intimidating for all stakeholders, and supporting stakeholders through this process was key to a successful handover. Some comments from ISRF at the wrap-up of the project spoke volumes:
Client Feedback:
"I honestly feel like I’ve never felt this supported by a team going through a migration, and I always felt like you guys had really helpful suggestions and solutions."
"It's really made us feel supported even though there were staff changes. Overall I feel like it was a quite painless process."
The
Result
The project brought together data that had previously been spread across fundraising, marketing, support, and commerce systems. Today, InnerScience operates from a centralized HubSpot platform containing:
Constituent Records (Single View)
Historical Donations
Pledges Made by Constituents
Constituent Activities
Unifying complex engagement data across platforms:
- 13,397 historical email engagement records from Constant Contact, to help sew together the historical engagement and communications activity
- 5,366 Zendesk tickets connected to constituent records, to help contextualize support queries and issues raised previously
- Ongoing synchronization of more than 69,000 donation records from Fundraise Up to continue to build a fuller picture of donation activity per constituent
Looking Ahead: A Model for Digital Transformation
The result is a complete view of supporter engagement, improved reporting, reduced manual administration, and a foundation for more sophisticated fundraising and marketing initiatives.