Founded in 1951
Staff of 150
1,000 volunteers
4 shelters
3 recovery programs
2 thrift stores
Car dealership
Summer camp and youth center
Union Gospel Mission has been a trusted member of the Pacific Northwest community since 1951. Partnering with individuals and organizations throughout the region, UGM runs several establishments and programs to help the homeless.
UGM’s website has become a central pillar in their fundraising efforts, and an important component in keeping their programs active and growing. They sought a solution that would allow them to scale their fundraising efforts, reduce recurring technical problems with their website, and improve the user-experience for prospective donors.
Union Gospel Mission had several issues with their website that limited its effectiveness as a fundraising tool. The existing site couldn’t handle the traffic generated and the donation process was unintuitive and unstable. Because of these challenges, UGM migrated to HubSpot COS - which offered a more reliable, efficient solution that could scale to match their promotional efforts.
Despite the improved speed and elimination of server crashes, UGM faced new challenges in HubSpot. To process donations, they had to choose the right donation tools for HubSpot. They ended up connecting HubSpot to three separate tools - Gravity Forms and Stripe to process payments on the site, and Zapier to pass donation information into HubSpot.
This process was difficult to manage and required frequent maintenance and updates for new campaigns. Each donation landing page required a unique form that had to be integrated across all four of these tools. It wasn’t scalable and began to cause issues that would ultimately lead to lost donations. With no built-in tool in HubSpot, they were unsure how to resolve the problem.
"At first it looked like we might have to write our own payment plugin for HubSpot, which was going to be a lot of extra work.”
They grew frustrated that, despite an improved website experience, they weren’t able to easily fill this massive goal in their donation process.
UGM spent several weeks evaluating potential solutions, consulting with HubSpot and payment processing specialists, and even investing internal development time to try and build an in-house solution.
They were unable to find a solution that matched their specific needs until they discovered DepositFix. In DepositFix, UGM was able to eliminate the complicated integrations and overcome the donation challenges they had used to manage payment forms before, migrating everything into one interface.
They can now handle transactions with ease and take payments and manage forms alongside one another in HubSpot. The process of setting up, testing, and evaluating new landing pages and donation forms is much faster, allowing them to continuously improve the donation process.
"Good security features in combination with a great customer support experience and the fact that it is an official HubSpot partner gave us a peace of mind to proceed with DepositFix."
Using DepositFix, UGM simplified the use and maintenance of more than thirty donation forms, transaction tracking data in Stripe, and donor management for their staff in a single easy-to-use interface. Their payment forms became more usable internally, allowing them to scale their efforts, provide unique thank-you pages based on landing page activity, as well as manage subscriptions and payments all from within the HubSpot ecosystem.
The result, according to Hannah Page, a Web Specialists for UGM, was a 17% increase in donation revenue year over year after twelve months of using DepositFix.
"The donation experience was so much better that more and more people were donating. It was very encouraging for us."
By combining the reliability and power of HubSpot with the donation management features in DepositFix, UGM was able to reduce friction for internal users, improve the donor user-experience, and collect data they could use to improve future fundraising efforts.
