RE NXT and HubSpot Integration: RaiserSync

Karen McCue

We are considering the RaiserSync HubSpot/RE integration. Does anyone have experience with this product? Any Pros or Cons? One specific question from our Marketing Department is how to segment different groups for various emails. Looking at the sync Fields list it is not clear if there is a way to easily do this. I am setting up a meeting with HubSpot but wanted to ask here as well. Thanks in advance for any tips!

Tanner Patnode

@Karen McCue
Hi Karen,

Gosh do I have a lot to say about this. To preface this, we are finishing up looking at marketing platforms (Luminate Online, Hubspot, Campaign Monitor, Feathr) and it is sounding like our MarCom team is really wanting to go with Hubspot. We have had several calls with them regarding features, pricing, integration, implementation, ect.

With that said, we are running into a host of issues with the way the data is going back and forth with RE.

Our primary issues right now are:

Managing duplicate records. Hubspot's “token” is email addresses as opposed to RE's is the REID. We are now speaking with a 3rd party integration service trying to figure out how we would manage duplicates without a ton of manual work, Hubspot recommended we go that route and didn't have any simple methods for us to fix our major concern without essentially using their platform as the system of record. Hubspot has a duplication remediation feature but if a record exists in Hubspot with an email already and we update their email in RE then sync, which we are CONSTANTLY doing, it is going to recreate that constituent's record in Hubspot with the same name but with the new email. The manual effort of researching each constituent's email one by one after we do a large import for example, would be awful. This would also add to our record count in Hubspot.

RE records that share the same email address. We have many constituents that share the same email address (ex. husband and wife, some of our students put down their parent's email as their own but their parent is also record with the same email address. In RE, they are separate constituents but using the same email). If we segment the husband via a list to send out an email, then want to send the wife a different email, the most recent email we send is going to overwrite the previous one. In this case, the wife's information would overwrite the husbands because their email address is the same. This then creates a whole mess when sending the data back into RE because one of them has been overwritten. Not to mention how this would affect salutations.

Unless you use Hubspot's giving pages, we won't be able to track conversions (we are still going to use RE Giving Pages). We would solicit someone for a gift, they might make a gift but the data in Hubspot is not going to show which email or solicitation effort was the one that lead to the gift because they are going to be sent to our RE giving pages.

Hubspot and most of the people we have talked to recommended importing our entire marketable database into Hubspot then segmenting within their platform. We currently have someone who does all of the segmenting in RE, if our MarCom team started segmenting in Hubspot, we have potential to duplicate actions unless the communication between both of the teams is impeccable, and I do not see that happening.

I'm sure there is more but that's a decent start. I would LOVE to hear about any other RE user's specifically in higher-ed that have made this work. I've tried about any many keywords both here in BB community as well as the Hubspot community and haven't been able to find much.

SmartTHING Developers

@Tanner Patnode @Karen McCue We provide a working integration with Hubspot if you would like to find out more, not a lot of manual work required at all. Contact the team support at smartthing.org if interested or Private Message me.

Cheers

Warren Sherliker - CEO - SmartTHING

Stu Manewith

Omatic Software also has a state-of-the-tech, cloud-forward integration for HubSpot and RE NXT. For further information, email info@omaticsoftware.com or visit omaticsoftware.com.

Karen McCue

@Tanner Patnode
Thank you for this valuable information! You address some of the exact concerns our team had.