What is Blackbaud?
Blackbaud is a leading provider of software and services designed specifically for the nonprofit, education, and healthcare industries. Blackbaud's products and services help organizations increase fundraising and donor engagement, manage events, increase volunteerism, and tell the impact of the organization's mission.
Blackbaud also provides comprehensive services to help organizations get the most out of their technology investments. Blackbaud is dedicated to powering an open community of partners and clients to achieve social good.
Blackbaud and HubSpot can be integrated by using the Blackbaud Connector for HubSpot. The connector brings together the donor and constituent data from Blackbaud and the marketing, sales, and service capabilities of HubSpot.
It enables users to create and track marketing campaigns, track donations, manage contacts, and more. The integration provides a seamless flow of data between both systems and helps in reducing manual data entry and improve accuracy.
Blackbaud HubSpot Integration
HubSpot and Blackbaud, native integration option, is available. You can sync your data from Blackbaud into HubSpot and perform your marketing tasks. But still, for this particular integration, we went to the custom integration route for one major reason.
"Multiple endpoints from Blackbaud were required to be merged into one HubSpot object, which was associated with the contact object," said Anas Nawaz, who worked as an integration developer on this project.
This functionality of merging multiple endpoints into one object was unavailable through native integration. This was the custom business logic for which we had to choose custom integration.
Challenges Faced During Integration
The one challenge is, merging multiple properties from Blackbaud into HubSpot's one property; that's the core of this custom integration.
The second challenge the team faced was the app permissions and authentications. Our client-side team thought they had given us access to everything we needed, but that was not the case. It turns out there was an error from the server side. The Computan team contacted the client's server support, updated the call server time, and resolved the issue.
The Need for Middleware Application
Like in almost every custom integration project, there was a need for a middleware application, Blackbaud, and HubSpot integration as well.
We built a Middleware application in Laravel PHP.
The middleware would fetch the data from Blackbaud and merge them into the data sets or properties understandable by HubSpot. This necessary step is done for proper data mapping.
Blackbaud HubSpot Integration Result
"We successfully did API calls to connect with Blackbaud, cron to get newly created/updated users from Blackbaud," Habib Ullah, Project Manager at Computan.
The client would successfully see the data in HubSpot. Multiple endpoints merged into one and viewed in HubSpot. Our client's marketers can now use that data for marketing purposes and target the audience better.
Computan Team
Developer: Anas Nawaz
Lead: Ghilman Khurshid
Project Manager: Habib Ullah
What is the main opportunity with integrating the two?
The usual reason to integrate Blackbaud with HubSpot is to pull donation history from Blackbaud to HubSpot so that marketers can modify their content and marketing campaigns.
This is a prime example of data-driven marketing. Marketers customize their social media posts, website content, email content, and landing page content, all around the data of their donors they get.
Marketers push the efforts from where they get the most conversions from visitors to donors.
Blackbaud and HubSpot Integration: One-way sync or a two-way sync?
Usually, it is a one-way sync from Blackbaud and HubSpot. Blackbaud gives good support to fundraising campaigns. Its features and functions are around fundraising and donations. For further data and lead management, social media marketing, email marketing, and paid ads, HubSpot is recommended.
If a company is already using Blackbaud for email marketing and customer management and their teams are also well-versed with the tool, they don't have any reason to use HubSpot for email marketing. They can use HubSpot to segment the data better and bring it back to Blackbaud for email marketing. In that case, it will be a two-way integration, but that too with little work in HubSpot.
