Not only does HubSpot offer a healthy 40% discount for qualifying nonprofits, but it also provides nonprofit-friendly onboarding and is designed to integrate with existing systems, ensuring you don’t have to change any of your donation or donor outreach efforts. We’ve worked with several nonprofit organizations to integrate HubSpot and generate better results. For example, Union Gospel Mission was able to increase online donations by 17% year over year, simplifying the entire process, both on the front-end and for back-end administrators.
HubSpot’s seamless integration of marketing tools for email outreach, social media management and testing, sales tools for donor cultivation, in-line donation, CRM, and CMS to quickly build and edit landing pages makes it a good fit for almost any size organization. If you are a nonprofit considering HubSpot as a potential solution for your software stack, this guide will walk through how to easily set up and optimize your landing pages to capture donations, automatically follow up with donors, and support future campaigns. You can also download one of the several guides offered by HubSpot around nonprofit marketing and fundraising trends in 2022, content marketing for nonprofits, and inbound marketing as a whole for nonprofit organizations.
One of the most powerful tools offered by HubSpot is the landing page creation system built into the marketing hub and CMS. This tool allows nonprofits to purchase or create custom themes that they can quickly utilize to build landing pages for specific campaigns. HubSpot is specifically designed to support a streamlined, user-friendly journey for every visitor to your website, whether you are optimizing individual pages, A/B testing broad campaigns, or micro-targeting your donation campaigns based on demographic and psychographic research.
Building a nonprofit landing page in HubSpot requires attention to several key elements to ensure optimal conversion rates and donations for your organization.
To start, your landing page should identify the value proposition of your nonprofit. What does a donation accomplish, and what tangible benefits to the cause you represent can the donor see from their donation? This should be included above the fold, among the very first things that your donor sees when they visit your landing page.
Your above-the-fold message should be front and center and not overwhelmed by multiple banner images in a carousel, a navigation menu that might send the donor to another page on your website, or other distracting elements. A simple headline, a short blurb describing what the donation will be used for, and an engaging banner image will do the trick.
Your landing page should be fully optimized for mobile use as well. HubSpot templates and themes are generally designed to be responsive and work equally well on mobile and desktop devices. Be sure to check, especially if you use a custom template.
Another crucial thing to consider when building a HubSpot landing page for your next donation campaign is how you request the donation. Simple changes like predefined gift amount buttons, an option to donate on a recurring basis, and security labels can help to increase trust and boost donations.
Learn more about the specific things your landing page should include, how a dedicated donation page should hold and process user attention, and how HubSpot will support your efforts in our in-depth guide to donation page structure.
There are several solutions to take donations with HubSpot. The out-of-the-box solution in HubSpot is a ready-made Stripe integration, but HubSpot’s Stripe integration can be limited. It is designed more for business quotes than form-based donations or signups. It’s also possible to build your integration using tools like Zapier or the suite of integrations in the HubSpot App Marketplace. These offer varying levels of data clarity, and many of them require multiple additional tools and subscriptions that live outside of HubSpot.
The donation tool you select, or the one you build with the tools at your disposal, is immensely important to the effectiveness of your campaign. That’s why many organizations trust DepositFix as an important part of their HubSpot integrated donation system.
DepositFix allows you to process payments without redirecting donors to another page, as many third-party payment processors require. This ensures a better overall payment experience for donors on the front end and a more efficient, data-driven solution for your team on the backend. DepositFix feeds your payment data to HubSpot so you can get a clear sense of how your campaigns are performing, where to adjust your marketing efforts, and how to improve overall performance on your pages. CRM extensions provide contact-level insights on past payments, while workflows allow you to send personalized emails to donors and internal stakeholders alike automatically.
Setting up a new donation form with DepositFix is a quick three-step process:
1. When logged in to your DepositFix dashboard, go to the forms page and click “Create a New Form”
2. Within the DepositFix form builder, fill in the details of your form, such as general settings and product information. Choose which HubSpot form your donation form will be attached to as well.
When creating products, you have the flexibility to select whether it is a single or recurring payment, the amount of the payment, and whether the donor can change the quantity when completing the form.
3. Click on “Publish Form,” and it will be ready to use on your HubSpot landing page.
Watch a detailed walkthrough of the process for more details:
A well-designed donation form will be simple to navigate and offer multiple ways for donors to engage (with selection amounts, recurring payment options, etc.). Here’s an example of a live donation form. Notice the way the form guides users while providing options. They can choose from several preselected amounts or update the donation to any amount they want, adjust from One time to Monthly, and there is an option to cover the processing fees as part of the donation.
This last part is particularly important for nonprofits who see a substantial percentage of their donations go to payment gateways as processing fees. When you process a credit card payment, some portion (usually 2-3%) goes to a payment gateway. But you can ask your donors to cover that fee. Many will gladly do so. It ensures that 100% of their original gift goes to the organization. This one minor tweak will add 3% in donations to your cause.
HubSpot’s automation tools are among the most robust in the industry. For nonprofits, this is a must. The ability to automate donation receipts, followups and internal notifications is extremely powerful and will directly impact the effectiveness of your fundraising efforts. Let’s take a closer look at three of the most impactful automations for nonprofits you can set up in HubSpot.
We’ve prepared an in-depth library of resources with step-by-step instructions for creating workflows based on the results of a donation. Two of the most common that we recommend for all nonprofits are success and failure workflows after an attempted donation.
A success workflow will trigger when someone has successfully donated. When creating such a workflow, you can filter by amount, payment processor, payment status, mode, or product name, among other elements.
When the system identifies a successful donation, you can use HubSpot’s automation features to send an email to the donor confirming receipt of the donation, thanking them for their support, and personalizing your message to build a stronger initial relationship with that donor. Personalization tokens can be used to display payment fields, including:
A good email will be personal, specific, and go into greater detail about how the donation will be used. Here’s an example that TechnoServe, a DepositFix customer, uses:
TechnoServe’s email uses HubSpot personalization tokens to address the recipient by their first name, confirm the most recent donation and date, and then delve into more details that build a stronger connection with the donor. This type of nurturing post-donation provides further context for individual donations, builds trust with donors, and encourages long-term recurring donations.
End-of-year emails detailing total donations for tax purposes are extremely important. Many donors forget about their donations and lose out on tax benefits. By sending a reminder with the full amount of donations for a year, you can help them save money and reengage with them after potentially weeks or months of inactivity.
To support sending these end-of-year emails, DepositFix creates properties for All Payments and <year> Total Payment. These allow you to show all payments made to date and all payments made for a specific year.
To find these properties, open a specific contact record in HubSpot and click on View All Properties, then navigate to the Payment property group or search for “payment,” and you will be able to see them.
With this information, you can easily create templates that provide detailed information about all donations made in a given year or over the lifetime of a donor’s activity with your organization.
In addition to the recurring end-of-year emails these properties support, you can sort and evaluate contacts in HubSpot’s CRM by the total amount donated. This helps identify top donors for future campaigns. You can recognize them with a special gift, reach out to them with custom language that is specific to your top donors or otherwise segment them from the regular list, ensuring higher levels of engagement and more successful fundraising efforts.
Equally important to the receipt sent to your donors is an internal notification to relevant parties after the donation is processed.
In this workflow, you can see that contacts are enrolled when the amount of a donation they make equals $400. They then receive a receipt email, and an internal notification is sent to Support @ DepositFix, all immediately after the transaction data is recorded by HubSpot.
If you’re unable to use workflows, you can send Stripe receipts directly as well. To do so, In Stripe, navigate to Business settings > Customer emails, then check Successful payments.
You can also send receipts manually. from Stripe through the following steps:
A donor portal provides a branded landing page with all the information your donors need to track their activity with your organization. They can quickly update profile information, store new payment methods, adjust their recurring plans, and download receipts and donation information for end-of-year tax purposes. Using DepositFix, your users can quickly access this information, either directly from your website or from links in the automated emails you send using HubSpot workflows.
Each donor has a custom landing page built for them and hosted by DepositFix, with information automatically pulled from Stripe. On this page, they can easily update their payment details, view payment history, and cancel their subscription.
This provides an easy way for them to update their payment information without having to contact a member of your team. It’s a better overall user experience and reduces the need for hands-on support on your end.
With many donors choosing to signup for recurring payments, failed charges are a frequent issue. With HubSpot’s workflow tools, it is possible to reach out to donors when this happens automatically, quickly providing the links they need to update their payment information.
While Stripe provides email templates for failed payments, they are generic and lacking in personalization. In HubSpot, you can create a template and populate it with personalization tokens that contain specific information about a donor’s failed payment. Each contact will have a property called Billing Profile that will link to their Donor Portal. By including this link in your automated follow-up email, you provide an immediate way for them to fix the issue without requiring manual updates by your admin team.
This can significantly reduce the number of failed payments, recover failed credit cards for donors, and reduce back-end work for your administrators.
Nonprofit organizations are increasingly targeted by complex fraud attacks, specifically credit card testing fraud. Card testing is the process that fraudsters will go through to check which of the stolen card numbers they have purchased are still active. The result is that websites with single-page credit card capture (such as nonprofits) are targeted with massive waves of authorization checks and subsequently chargebacks.
Whether the charges go through or not, your organization is on the hook for the transaction fees and a large number of likely chargebacks. If the number is high enough, it can lead to a suspension of your Stripe account, completely interrupting your ability to raise funds online. It’s important to put tools in place that protect against this type of fraud.
ReCaptcha is a security service that protects your websites from fraud and abuse. DepositFix uses Google Recaptcha. Google automatically shows the ReCaptcha whenever it suspects suspicious traffic (based on a traffic score module). This means that the ReCaptcha will not show for absolutely everybody, but only for form submissions with suspicious traffic.
Stripes Radar is a fraud prevention toolset built directly into Stripe’s payment flow. It is supported by powerful machine learning algorithms that monitor for patterns across payments processed with Stripe, assessing the risk level of each. Stripe users Radar to manage the logic for blocking credit cards. To view and adjust the rules for Stripe Radar, go to Stripe Dashboard > Radar.
One of the reasons we so adamantly recommend HubSpot for nonprofit organizations is that it offers a substantial App Marketplace with tools specifically designed to work with nonprofit outreach campaigns. Some tools with native integrations in the HubSpot marketplace include Wistia, Jotform, Slack, Eventbrite, GravityForms, Typeform, Zoom, Hopin, DocuSign, Humanitix, and Formstack.
You can view the full library of tools with nonprofit-specific features here.
How to increase the number of returnung donors to you nonprofit organization by up to 71% in 12 months using a hubspot integrated donation system.
HubSpot is a powerful partner for any nonprofit organization, providing a robust suite of marketing tools to support your outreach efforts, CRM for contact and donor management, and automation to streamline delivery of receipts, end-of-year statements, and new outreach. If you’re with a nonprofit and are interested in learning more about HubSpot can fit your needs, HubSpot for Nonprofits offers a suite of additional support and discounted pricing. You can apply for HubSpot for nonprofits here.
To supplement your efforts, DepositFix fits seamlessly into HubSpot’s systems, allowing you to integrate donation forms directly into your landing pages, deliver receipts and credit card recapture automatically following a transaction, and display donor information in a succinct, easy-to-use portal.
Learn more about DepositFix and how it synchronizes Stripe and PayPal transaction data to HubSpot fields, embeds anywhere on your landing pages, and populates timeline events in HubSpot contact records for greater transparency. Signup for a 14-day free trial to evaluate if DepositFix is the right fit for your nonprofit.
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Ultimate Guide for Nonprofits Using HubSpot
Nonprofit marketing is simply employing marketing strategies and tactics to further the cause and mission of an organization, resulting in donations and volunteer support.
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DepositFix lets you create donation forms and allows your users to choose between Stripe, PayPal, ACH, Google and Apple Pay.
