By Amy Rose and Brian Greenwald, Co-CEOs at Benevolent Tech – a strategic services firm of nonprofit superfans dedicated to helping for-purpose organizations thrive.

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The nonprofit sector in the United States stands at a crossroads.

This is certainly due to the global, social, and political climate, however it’s also due to trends that are transforming the tech industry itself. Technology vendors and service providers have long touted that traditional CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) systems were the end-all-be-all for every organization, assuming that nonprofits will simply follow along. Come to us, and our CRM will cure all that ails you as an organization.

The fallacy behind this approach is crumbling. Fast.

Once the linchpin of donor and constituent engagement, the CRM landscape is experiencing significant upheaval and these platforms are no longer being viewed as the single-source-of-truth they once were. Any company that tells you that all your data should reside exclusively in a CRM they will shoe-horn you into is stretching the truth at best. Are these platforms powerful and extensible? Yes. Should they take on organizational functions for which they were never designed with extensive customization and configuration? No.

As American nonprofits navigate increasing headwinds that challenge their literal existence, all while meeting their staff’s needs, serving their constituents, crafting compelling narratives, measuring impact with precision, and cultivating community collaboration, the demand for adaptable, cost-effective, user-friendly, and interoperable technology has never been more urgent.

The Disruption of Traditional CRM Systems

Historically, nonprofits have relied on CRM systems as the single source of truth to manage donor relationships, track contributions, manage programs, align caseworker and volunteer information, coordinate outreach efforts and marketing, and more. However, many of these legacy systems are becoming increasingly inadequate as the complexity of these processes grow, or are so overwrought that they cannot function without extensive administration – undermining the promise of efficiency by demanding more manual effort to get work done. They often burden organizations with high technical debt, substantial engineering resources, and usability challenges for non-technical staff, not to mention inflated costs during the lifetime of ownership as licenses for new products or “solutions” are sold to organizations. 

This complexity diverts valuable time, energy, and resources away from mission-critical activities. It’s overwhelming, and negates the core promise of tech for good: that impact organizations should be met where they’re at with technology, and not have to contort themselves to fit into these solutions.

Product Innovation through Community

Recognizing these challenges, we believe HubSpot is making the right moves to innovate on their technology products while fostering a strong partner ecosystem to tailor the right industry-specific solutions for customers. This may come as a surprise, given our opening about the changes in the tech needed by nonprofits. However, while HubSpot does have a CRM component, they are building essential integrations and empowering partners to craft solutions on the platforms that actually work for mission-driven organizations. They don’t try to be the “end-all-be-all” that boxes you into their assumptions about what nonprofits need. 

The Benevolent Community of partners and organizations we’re building to deliver excellence to nonprofits is proof of its extensibility. No one destination is a cure-all, and our partners believe that they are stronger, together, in helping meet tailored ecosystem needs with integrated, ecosystem-driven alignments that allow every solution to be the best solution for your nonprofit.

Benevolent Tech is committed to developing solutions that address the evolving needs of nonprofits alongside HubSpot, HubSpot partners, and the greater community of companies that serve nonprofits. Our focus is on creating products that empower organizations to harness the right data, in the right context, with the right front-end to meet your organization’s needs where they’re at, so you can act to enable program teams to craft impactful stories, deliver their programs effectively, and raise more funds. 

Central to this initiative is our investment in platforms that prioritize partner and community collaboration, ensuring that our solutions are innovative, grounded in the real-world experiences and needs of nonprofits, and interoperable – no longer should any organization be held hostage by a single application or platform.

Use Your Data for its Most Meaningful Purposes

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in analytical tools, offering nonprofits unprecedented capabilities in data analysis and decision-making. AI can automate routine tasks, uncover patterns in donor behavior, and predict trends, enabling organizations to allocate resources more efficiently and personalize engagement strategies. With AI built into its core operation, HubSpot offers you new insights into your donor data along with intuitive tools to guide your work.

Storytelling is also paramount in today’s landscape, and the ability to do so relies on accurate and timely impact measurement. Donors and stakeholders seek transparent, compelling narratives that illustrate the tangible outcomes of their contributions. Effective storytelling, underpinned by robust data from your CRM, can significantly enhance engagement and support for your organization. This requires tools that not only collect and manage data but also work together seamlessly to facilitate its transformation into meaningful insights and narratives.

Nonprofits have the opportunity to align their technology to the purposes, engagements, and outcomes they want to drive, and putting the right tools and systems in place is now more critical than ever. Where does your organization want to spend your time – centralizing everything, or accessing and unleashing your data in the right places for the right purpose at the right time?

Why HubSpot is an Excellent Option for Nonprofits

At Benevolent Tech, we’ve chosen to build on HubSpot because it aligns with the core needs of the nonprofit sector:

• Power and Flexibility: HubSpot offers a comprehensive suite of tools that can be tailored to nonprofit fundraising, donor management, and constituent and donor engagement, without necessitating extensive engineering effort.
• Low Technical Debt: Its intuitive interface reduces the reliance on IT support, allowing non-technical staff to manage and adapt the system effectively. For the technically-minded, HubSpot is also built on a unified code base and integrated with itself: it’s not an acquisition-driven platform compiled from partially integrated solutions that never materialize their full promise. A powerful example of this is their acquisition of Clearbit, a data enrichment tool that they completely rebuilt into their Breeze AI solution.
• High Usability: Designed with the end-user in mind, HubSpot’s UI/UX stays the same across record types and the relationships between each record are just one click away. This ensures that nonprofit professionals can focus on their mission rather than navigating complex scenarios to report on, compile lists of, and engage with their constituents and donors.
• Integrated Intelligence: HubSpot’s AI is built into the platform, helping your team more quickly and easily adopt and realize the value of your existing investment. Rather than adding yet another product for you to buy, there is a built-in help Agent to assist you in building the lists, reports, and tasks that you need. It can use the data from your donor profiles to give you a summary of engagements, activities, and proposed next steps. HubSpot’s AI also consumes integrated data from an ecosystem of partner applications, bringing together this mission-critical information along with your core donor profile data to create meaningful follow-ups for your team that drive action and help you hit your fundraising goals.
• Extensive Ecosystem and Support: With over 1,000 integrations and a supportive community, HubSpot enables organizations to extend their capabilities seamlessly. Integrated applications put their data into HubSpot’s platform using well-defined strategies to support reporting, dashboards, and list-building needs.

By leveraging HubSpot, nonprofits can reduce dependence on vendors and technical administrators, fostering greater autonomy in managing their technology stack. This empowerment allows organizations to select best-in-class solutions that deliver product, service, and data interoperability, ensuring that all components work harmoniously to support their unique objectives. 

We’ll also take a moment to ask you, has the promise of having everything in a single solution genuinely paid off for your organization? Has having a single vendor been the panacea it was promised to be? Or has the nonstop accommodations and customizations simply taxed your organization’s time and budget?

Introducing the Mission Action Pack (MAP)

To further enhance the accessibility and affordability of HubSpot for nonprofits, we are proud to introduce Mission Action Pack (MAP). MAP is our product built directly on HubSpot designed to streamline the adoption of HubSpot for nonprofits, providing tailored strategies and resources that align with your specific fundraising and marketing challenges. This initiative elevates HubSpot as a viable alternative to legacy platforms such as Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack and Marketing Cloud, Bonterra’s EveryAction, Blackbaud’s Raisers Edge and Luminate, and other nonprofit CRMs and marketing tools. 

Want to see how the Mission Action Pack (MAP) could work for your organization? Learn more at benevolent.tech and schedule a personal demo.

Like HubSpot, we’re working to bring an ecosystem of partners together to help solve your organization’s extended needs with program/case management and impact measurement, advocacy, direct marketing, online fundraising, and more. We’re announcing MAP as a template for action inside HubSpot, one that your organization can continue to tailor and leverage in conjunction with integrated solutions. What we’re not going to tell you is that it is the only solution you’ll ever need.

Partner and Community Collaboration

Our approach is deeply rooted in partnership and community engagement. We collaborate with partners of all types like Fundraise Up, Deluxe Payments & Data, Soapbox Engage, Postalytics, event hapily, ROI Solutions, SureImpact, and threshold.world to ensure that our combined solutions are holistic and nonprofit contextual, taking into account how teams work together and how services can be delivered most effectively. 

This collaborative ethos ensures that our products are not only technologically robust but also aligned with the real-world dynamics of nonprofit operations. Nonprofits absolutely deserve the best commercial and industrial technologies available to them, and they also deserve businesses willing to step up and invest in them as an ecosystem as part of bridging this technology to the mission-driven world.

Together, let’s embrace the future of nonprofit technology—one that is adaptable, community-driven, and truly aligned with the missions we serve that puts the right technology in the right hands for action.