One of the biggest challenges for a nonprofit using HubSpot for their fundraising efforts is effectively closing the loop on donation activities. How do you capture, track, and use data about your one-time donors, recurring donors, and canceled donors in real-time? When someone interacts with a donation form, how do you ensure that data is instantly usable in your HubSpot account?
As powerful as HubSpot is, you’d expect this to be easier. Unfortunately, however nimble the platform is, it wasn’t originally designed to process payments, let alone capture donations through forms. Integration with third-party tools is required, and in many cases, the tools available were insufficient.
This leaves people with one of two options: cobble something together that is difficult to manage and breaks easily, or purchase a tool that only gets you 50% of the way there. Fortunately, there is another way, but first, let’s look at what many companies are using and how they leave much to be desired.
At first glance, it looks like HubSpot should be able to handle payments with its combination of third party tools and robust form features. After all, there is a Stripe integration listed on its pricing page and in several pages of documentation. Unfortunately, there are strict limitations on what the Stripe integration can do, most of it relegated to sales transactions.
Per HubSpot’s documentation, With the Stripe integration, bill your customers directly from their quote, and send all payments to your integrated Stripe account. As part of the Quote tool in HubSpot sales, Stripe can be integrated to enable payments on quotes and contracts passed through the CRM.
For nonprofits, this makes it essentially unusable for fundraising. Because donations are often solicited as part of a wider fundraising campaign that drives traffic to a landing page with an embedded payment form, a separate solution is required.
Through tools like Zapier and PieSync, you can link separate tools and pass data between them. Zapier, in particular, is the tool of choice for integrating third-party applications to HubSpot that don’t have their own native integrations. The cost of doing so is relatively low depending on the number of times these tools will communicate with each other, and the setup process is fairly straightforward. Some technical expertise is required, but there is a guided walkthrough that carefully outlines what you need at each step.
The problem with relying on Zapier or other comparable tools for your integration with a payment solution is that they are often limited. HubSpot has hundreds of built-in properties across several unique objects and you can build hundreds of more custom properties.
Additionally, data is saved to individual contact records as an activity - the pages they view, the emails they open and click, and the content they read. Integrating with Zapier, frequently you are limited to individual properties that sync with one another. Think of a spreadsheet copying cells to another spreadsheet. To extract meaningful data from the integration requires significant further customization both in the payment processing tool and in HubSpot.
And one thing you can rarely sync between the tools (and never in full) is user tracking. Because HubSpot only starts to capture and associate user activity with a specific contact record when that individual completes a form and the appropriate cookie is installed on their computer, it’s highly difficult to track the complete journey of a user from email to donation landing page and then subsequent activities after donation.
Outside of the HubSpot ecosystem, there are several tools designed specifically to facilitate nonprofit donations. Classy.org offers several fundraising tools that are popular in the community, including a Website Donations tool that can be embedded on any page. While it is designed for nonprofits and looks professional, it doesn’t integrate with HubSpot’s built-in tools, even when embedded on a landing page.
Other tools like RaiseDonors are designed to integrate with more tools and offer a basic integration option with HubSpot deals to pass data between the two platforms, but there are substantial limitations to how that data can be passed and the activity tracking you can set up.
We built DepositFix to address the challenges nonprofits have in capturing, tracking, and leveraging donor information at the point of donation. With DepositFix, your payment form is integrated directly on your website, giving you complete control over fields and styles.
Additionally, it automatically syncs with the HubSpot database because it uses HubSpot’s built-in form tools, adding payment field options to the existing tools. Purchase data becomes a signal in HubSpot that you can use to automate responses, inform future campaigns, and segment your donors.
Additionally, donors are easier to manage in the HubSpot CRM, adding relevant payment and subscription information from Stripe to all relevant contacts, and allowing users to refund transactions and cancel subscriptions from within the HubSpot CRM if necessary.
If your nonprofit uses HubSpot to manage contacts, host landing pages and send emails, you need DepositFix. It is the only way to fully integrate all elements of your donation pages with HubSpot’s powerful CRM and automation capabilities.
