HubSpot for Nonprofits Webinar: Moving off legacy systems like Blackbaud

Donors don't give nonprofits a pass on digital experience. They tap to pay everywhere else and expect the same from your donation form. Meanwhile, most nonprofits run on a patchwork of legacy tools that don't talk to each other.

In this panel, Ryan Ruud, founder and CEO of Lake One, talked with four guests about modernizing a nonprofit tech stack without breaking the budget:

• Mary Beth Meyer, Director of Marketing at Pinky Swear Foundation
• Salvatore Salpietro, Chief Community Officer at Fundraise Up
• Karen Sievewright, Chief Innovation Officer at Hewitt & Johnston Consultants (HJC)
• Allie Clifford, solutions engineer at HubSpot

What do donors expect from nonprofits now?

The same thing they expect from consumer brands. Sal described how COVID sped up contactless payments and digital-first experiences. Donors now expect to give with Face ID, not by typing their address into an old form. If giving takes too much effort, they abandon it.

Karen added the noise problem. Nonprofits compete for attention on the same phone as every other brand, usually with a small staff and a tight budget. The path from ad, to website, to donation form has to be seamless.

Mary Beth said Pinky Swear calls this "the Amazon effect." Donors want three things:

• An instant receipt
• Visibility into their impact
• A way to give feedback

Why do nonprofits outgrow legacy systems?

Pinky Swear had used at least six tools, each picked for a reason at the time:

• Blackbaud
• Wix
• WordPress
• Classy for peer-to-peer fundraising
• Mailjet for email
• A separate payment processor

None of them shared data. A 12-person team spent its time maintaining tools instead of building relationships.

Sal described the trade-off with legacy nonprofit platforms. They're built specifically for nonprofits, which is a real advantage. But they often limit integrations, so the vendor decides how your programs should work. HubSpot takes the opposite approach. It's industry-agnostic, which means some relabeling (donations live in "deals," for example), but you can build it around your mission. Corporate donors, individual donors, and programs like child sponsorship can all be modeled the way your organization actually operates.

Ryan's caution: technology is not the strategy. No tool solves your problems just because you bought it.

What does a consolidated nonprofit CRM look like?

Allie walked through a donor record in HubSpot configured for nonprofits. One record holds:

• Giving history: status, number of gifts, last gift amount, and last gift date.
• Donations from Fundraise Up: synced directly, without developer resources.
• Engagement: emails, form submissions, and activity from connected tools like SMS, Eventbrite, and webinar platforms.
• Recurring plans and gift types: in nonprofit language, customizable to your naming conventions.

That single view does two things. It saves staff hours spent stitching reports together, and it makes personalized donor journeys possible.

Karen noted that direct mail still works and can connect through HubSpot integration partners. Her rule for any integration: data fails at the seams, just like pants do. Native, real-time integrations are worth paying attention to.

Who owns your donor data?

This is one of the biggest fears about switching platforms. Mary Beth shared a painful example. A former processor charged Pinky Swear a large fee to release about 200 donor records the organization thought it already owned.

Both Fundraise Up and HubSpot process payments on Stripe, and the nonprofit keeps ownership of its donor data. Sal described Fundraise Up's model as aligning its own business with the nonprofit's results, with no long-term contract required.

How do you switch without disrupting operations?

Take it in steps. Pinky Swear's sequence over 18 months:

1. Rebuilt the website on HubSpot CMS. They did it themselves, in under a month.
2. Added Fundraise Up for online donations.
3. Moved email from Mailjet to HubSpot and connected social, ads, and their Google Ad Grant.
4. Next: development, the donor database, and program operations. They expect the full migration to take two to three years.

Plan for overlap. Karen uses a "Maslow's hierarchy" of switching difficulty:

• Easiest: Donation forms. Often no contract and fast to swap.
• Middle: Websites. Run old and new side by side while you build.
• Hardest: The CRM. It needs the most selection time, planning, and overlap.

Use what's included. HubSpot offers a nonprofit discount on its software. It also includes 24/7 phone and chat support, a library of free tools, HubSpot Academy training, and native integrations with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. HubSpot doesn't have to be your CRM on day one. Some nonprofits run HubSpot for marketing on top of the Salesforce nonprofit CRM.

Final advice from the panel

• Sal: Raise your expectations of your software. If Pinky Swear can do this with 12 people and the Canadian Red Cross can do it at scale, you can too.
• Karen: Plan, and use the hierarchy as you plan.
• Allie: Be brave. Switching is psychologically hard, but the upside is large.
• Mary Beth: If Pinky Swear can do it, so can you.
• Ryan: Progress over perfection. For most nonprofits, the online donation experience is the easiest place to start.

Ready to map your move off a legacy CRM? Talk to Lake One about HubSpot for nonprofits.