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How a Nonprofit Fixed Revenue Tracking Gaps to Gain Leadership Visibility & Decision-Making with HubSpot

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How a Nonprofit Fixed Revenue Tracking Gaps to Gain Leadership Visibility & Decision-Making with HubSpot
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Background

The National Catholic Bioethics Center is a nonprofit organization based in Philadelphia that provides bioethics education, consultation services, and membership programs. The organization relies on multiple revenue streams (donations, tuition payments for training programs, and membership subscriptions), all of which need accurate tracking for board reporting and financial planning.
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Problem

Before working with us, The NCB Center managed donor relationships and financial data in SugarCRM. With their annual SugarCRM subscription expiring, leadership faced a decision: renew an outdated system or make a strategic move to HubSpot that would centralize operations and improve visibility across development, education, and membership teams.

  • Revenue Attribution Was Opaque: The organization couldn't quickly answer basic questions about giving patterns. Historical donation data sat in SugarCRM with inconsistent naming conventions and missing categorization. Leadership needed to identify major donors across multiple fiscal years, but the data structure made it nearly impossible without manual analysis. Board meetings required financial summaries that took days to compile.

 

  • Multiple Payment Systems Created Data Fragmentation: Donations flowed through Squarespace, DonorBox, and Stripe. Membership payments are processed through MemberSpace. Tuition came through separate channels. Each system tracked transactions independently, with no single source of truth for financial reporting. Finance teams spent hours cross-referencing HubSpot against QuickBooks to reconcile discrepancies, delaying month-end close and creating uncertainty about actual revenue performance.

 

  • Migration Risk Threatened Historical Continuity: Moving years of donor relationships from SugarCRM to HubSpot carried significant risk. The data wasn't clean; contacts were marked as companies, donation records were without proper categorization, and there was inconsistent field mapping. A failed migration would mean lost institutional knowledge about donor history, gift patterns, and relationships that took years to build. Leadership needed the migration done correctly before the SugarCRM subscription ended, with zero tolerance for data loss.
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Solution

We approached this as a data architecture and systems integration project, not a simple CRM swap. The client needed both immediate migration completion and long-term operational infrastructure that would support growth without requiring constant manual intervention.
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Part 1: Root Cause Diagnosis & Data Architecture

  • Conducted pre-migration analysis of years of SugarCRM data to identify companies misclassified as contacts, orphaned donation records, and property mapping gaps
  • Designed object structure connecting contacts, companies, deals (donations), orders (e-commerce), and line items with proper associations to maintain relationship history
  • Created custom properties to track fiscal year giving totals, deal categorization (donation vs. tuition vs. membership), and lifetime value metrics that didn't exist in the old system
  • Built data validation rules to prevent future corruption, including automated workflows to standardize deal naming conventions and flag records missing required information
  • Established property mapping between SugarCRM legacy fields and HubSpot objects, preserving historical data like "Lifetime Giving Blackbaud" as closed-won deals while eliminating outdated fields

Part 2: Execution & System Integration

  • Migrated contacts, companies, and donation history from SugarCRM with deduplication protocols that protected existing HubSpot data from being overwritten
  • Integrated Constant Contact for email marketing with proper field mapping and data sync configuration
  • Connected Squarespace e-commerce data through sample imports that validated property mapping before full-scale integration
  • Researched and documented integration paths for Stripe, MemberSpace, and DonorBox to centralize financial data from all payment processors
  • Built calculated properties and workflows to automatically categorize transactions by type (donation, tuition, membership) and fiscal year for accurate reporting
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FY22-FY25 PS
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Part 3: Reporting Infrastructure & Governance

  • Created custom reports tracking major donor identification (giving in any single fiscal year FY22-FY25), with separate columns showing giving totals by year
  • Developed fiscal year tracking reports that automatically calculate year-to-date donation totals while excluding tuition and membership payments
  • Built donor segmentation views that flag contacts for exclusion from reports and communications based on status changes
  • Delivered training documentation on email management, report building, and chart selection best practices so the team could maintain systems without ongoing support
  • Established reporting dashboard that gives leadership real-time visibility into donation performance, pipeline health, and campaign effectiveness
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Results

Before: Donor data scattered across SugarCRM and multiple payment processors. Leadership compiled board reports manually, spending days pulling data from disconnected systems. Major donor identification required spreadsheet analysis. Revenue attribution by source was unreliable.
After: All historical donor data successfully migrated to HubSpot with zero data loss. Financial transactions from multiple sources are flowing into a single system. Leadership accesses real-time giving reports with fiscal year breakdowns in minutes. Board reporting automated.

Financial Impact

  • Real-time business visibility: Leadership now accesses live fiscal year donation reports showing giving totals by year (FY22-FY25) without waiting for finance team compilation or manual spreadsheet analysis.
  • Data-driven decision-making: Major donor identification, happens instantly through custom reports, enabling targeted cultivation strategies based on actual giving patterns.
  • Single source of truth: All revenue streams (donations, tuition, and memberships) are centralized in one platform with consistent categorization, ending cross-referencing between HubSpot and QuickBooks.
  • Earlier identification of bottlenecks: Month-end reconciliation between HubSpot and QuickBooks reduced from days to hours through automated transaction categorization and fiscal year tracking.

 

Operational Impact

  • Reduced operational friction: The development team eliminated manual work categorizing donations and pulling donor reports through automated workflows that standardize deal naming and transaction types.
  • Easier day-to-day HubSpot usage: Training documentation reduced reliance on external support for routine reporting and email campaigns, empowering internal teams to build reports and manage communications independently.
  • More repeatable processes: Property mapping documentation and training materials established protocols for future system integrations, removing dependency on institutional knowledge.
  • Improved cross-team consistency: Standardized deal naming conventions and automated categorization workflows prevent data corruption that previously required cleanup projects.

 

Strategic Impact

  • Clearer performance reporting: Board presentations pull directly from automated reports that separate donations from tuition and membership revenue, eliminating days of manual data aggregation.
  • Growth-ready systems: Data architecture supports multiple payment processors and revenue streams without requiring constant restructuring as new donation channels are added.
  • Improved trust in HubSpot data: Migration preserved 10+ years of institutional donor knowledge with zero data loss, maintaining relationship history and giving patterns that inform current strategy.
Nonprofits managing multiple revenue streams face similar challenges when donor data lives in disconnected systems. Financial reporting becomes reactive instead of strategic. Board meetings rely on outdated information.
 
If your organization needs clearer visibility into giving patterns, better integration between payment systems, or confidence that your CRM supports decision-making instead of creating more work, we can help.
 
Book a free consultation to discuss your specific situation.

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