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How a Nonprofit Organization Achieved Operational Scalability While Reducing Marketing Costs with HubSpot

Education 11-50 Employees Marketing Hub | Sales Hub | Service Hub
How a Nonprofit Organization Achieved Operational Scalability While Reducing Marketing Costs with HubSpot
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Background

Aileron is a nonprofit organization that helps American small business owners grow through professional management education and training. Based in the United States, they work B2B with business owners to build leadership competence, increase team satisfaction, and create sustainable organizations. Their mission is to empower businesses to thrive by teaching systematic approaches to running a company.
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Problem

With 22,000+ contacts and a growing service operation, HubSpot had become their system of record for revenue operations and customer support, but the platform had accumulated years of technical debt that was beginning to create both financial and operational friction.

  • Unnecessary Marketing Costs from Inactive Contacts: Aileron was paying for thousands of marketing contacts who would never engage. Hard bounces, unsubscribed users, invalid email addresses, and contacts who hadn't opened an email in six months remained marked as billable marketing contacts. With HubSpot's pricing tied directly to active marketing contacts, this represented avoidable monthly spending with no corresponding value. Leadership needed visibility into which contacts were actually marketable and a system to prevent this cost from accumulating again.

 

  • Lost Revenue Visibility in Sales Pipeline: The Campus Pass sales pipeline contained incomplete or outdated deal amounts, making it impossible for leadership to forecast revenue accurately or understand true pipeline health. Some deals had no amounts at all. Others reflected outdated values from previous years. Without reliable data, the leadership team couldn't make confident decisions about resource allocation, hiring, or growth planning. The issue wasn't just bad data; it was that manual updates had become too time-consuming and error-prone to maintain at scale.

 

  • Support Chaos Without Clear Ticket Identification: As Aileron rolled out HubSpot's Breeze AI customer support agent, tickets flooded into the help desk without clear identification. Support staff couldn't tell at a glance whether a ticket came from a known contact or an anonymous visitor. Tickets were named inconsistently, making it difficult to prioritize, route, or analyze support volume by customer type. This created internal friction as the team scaled their support operation and made it harder to identify patterns or measure response times effectively.
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Solution

This wasn't a quick-fix project. Aileron needed process redesign, data governance, and automation architecture, not just cleanup. We prioritized work that would deliver immediate cost savings while building systems that prevented problems from recurring.
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Customer Breeze Agents PS
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Customer Breeze Agents PS
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Part 1: Data Health Diagnosis and System Architecture

  • Identified 265 duplicate contacts and 2 duplicate companies, creating confusion across sales and marketing teams, then established clear merge criteria prioritizing high-value records like current customers and open opportunities.
  • Audited all 52 forms in the portal to map where bad data was entering the system, analyzing last submission dates, page appearances, and usage patterns to identify dormant or duplicative assets.
  • Reviewed 1,133 segmentation lists to identify static snapshots from years ago, active lists with zero members, and temporary segments causing administrative noise and performance overhead.
  • Analyzed contact engagement patterns to determine which contacts were creating unnecessary marketing costs through hard bounces, unsubscribes, invalid domains, or extended inactivity periods.
  • Mapped how support tickets were being created through Breeze AI to understand why ticket naming was inconsistent and preventing effective prioritization.

Part 2: Automated Controls and Pipeline Restoration

  • Implemented a contact-based workflow to automatically unmark contacts, creating unnecessary marketing costs, hard bounces, unsubscribes, invalid email domains, and contacts inactive for 180+ days, with safeguards protecting customers, active deals, and recently engaged contacts.
  • Manually verified and updated 100 deal amounts in the Campus Pass pipeline to restore revenue visibility, cross-checking deal names and company associations to prevent misalignment.
  • Deployed a ticket naming workflow that dynamically identified whether support requests came from known contacts or unknown visitors, tagging each ticket with the source and record ID for easy tracking and routing.
  • Configured Breeze AI customer support agent with proper human handoff escalation logic to ensure complex inquiries automatically created tickets with full conversation history.
  • Delivered training on HubSpot's segmentation tools, help desk functionality, and live chat management so the internal team could maintain these systems independently.
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Breeze Ai Customer Agent PS
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Marketing Contacts PS
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Part 3: Governance Systems and Ongoing Visibility

  • Delivered audit documentation for all 52 forms and 1,133 segmentation lists in manageable batches, including usage status, submission data, and recommendations for which assets to keep, merge, or archive.
  • Retained client approval for all deletions and merges to ensure no historical data was lost without explicit consent, preventing accidental automation breakage.
  • Established reporting to monitor how many contacts were automatically unmarked each month and which criteria triggered the change, giving leadership ongoing visibility into marketing contact hygiene.
  • Provided recommendations to prevent duplicate creation in the future, including process improvements for list imports, form submission handling, and manual user entry.
  • Created documentation showing which forms were still actively used versus dormant assets, enabling informed decisions about portal cleanup and future form management strategy.
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Results

Before: Aileron was paying for thousands of unengaged marketing contacts, lacked reliable pipeline visibility, and faced support ticket chaos as they scaled their help desk operation.
After: Marketing costs were reduced through automated contact management, leadership gained confidence in pipeline data for forecasting, and support operations became traceable and scalable with clear ticket identification.
 

Financial Impact

  • Increased ROI from HubSpot subscription: The automated workflow for unmarking non-engaged contacts reduced unnecessary marketing contact billing without requiring manual oversight or monthly audits.
  • Improved revenue visibility: Manual verification and updates to 100 deals in the Campus Pass pipeline restored data accuracy, giving leadership confidence in forecasting and resource allocation decisions.

 

Operational Impact

  • Improved trust in HubSpot data: The deduplication process eliminated hundreds of duplicate contact records and duplicate companies, reducing confusion about which records were current and accurate across sales and marketing teams.
  • Easier day-to-day HubSpot usage: Audit documentation for forms and segmentation lists provided a clear action plan to reduce administrative clutter and improve portal performance by removing dormant assets.
  • Clearer sales next steps: The ticket-naming workflow enabled support staff to immediately identify whether requests came from known contacts or anonymous visitors, improving response prioritization and internal routing decisions.

 

Strategic Impact

  • More repeatable processes: Automated governance controls now prevent marketing cost creep through consistent identification and unmarking of low-value contacts based on engagement criteria, not individual judgment.
  • Real-time business visibility: Leadership has ongoing reporting showing which contacts are being unmarked and why, enabling proactive monitoring of data hygiene trends without requesting manual status updates.
  • Growth-ready systems: The standardized ticket naming conventions and AI agent escalation logic created a foundation for scaling support operations while maintaining visibility as ticket volume increases.
Nonprofits and education-focused organizations often face similar risks: accumulated technical debt in their CRM, unclear pipeline visibility, and support operations that break down as volume increases. These are problems that require process redesign, automation architecture, and governance systems that prevent issues from recurring.
 
If your HubSpot portal has become difficult to manage, is creating avoidable costs, or lacks the visibility your leadership team needs to make confident decisions, we can help. 
 
Book a free consultation to discuss your specific situation.

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