Phase 1 replaced Feathr and stood up Marketing Hub before the contract lapsed, which got the team into HubSpot months before the CRM arrived. Phase 2 built the CRM through Q4 while fundraising ran undisturbed, and cut over in January.
Lake One recommended migrating three to five years of active donor data, cleaned, and archiving the rest. WHI chose to preserve everything. That is a legitimate instinct when donor history is institutional memory, but also the hardest starting position, because after two decades without governance nobody knows what it contains.
The plan was rebuilt around that decision and cleanup was negotiated case by case: the Household entity scrapped and spouse relationships rebuilt as Contact-to-Contact association labels, duplicates merged, 2,437 designations consolidated to roughly 100, organized by program area, country and project.
Blackbaud was kept for reference until March 2026, when it was decommissioned.
The sequencing was a change management decision as much as a technical one: Marketing first so the team learned HubSpot on lower stakes, Blackbaud retained so they could check the new system against the old, and training delivered by role rather than all at once.
