Statewide Children’s Services Nonprofit Moves 35,000 Contacts from Mailchimp to HubSpot and Designs Custom Objects for Church and Foster Care Engagement

 

• Organization type: Statewide children’s services nonprofit
• Stakeholders: Donors, churches and church groups, volunteers, pastors, prospective foster and adoptive families, government and school partners
• Primary goal: One system for every stakeholder relationship, with reporting leadership can use
• Contacts migrated: 35,000+
• Delivery rate on first high-volume sends: 98.93%
• Spam report rate: 0.03%

The organization works with an unusually wide range of people and partners. A single person can be a donor, a church member, a volunteer and a prospective foster parent at once, and churches connect to regional networks and to their own groups and classes.

That information was spread across Raiser’s Edge, a separate volunteer system, Mailchimp and spreadsheets.

• Email lists in Mailchimp had built up years of overlapping, event-specific tags.
• There was no way to see how a church, its groups and its members related to each other.
• Leadership had no shared view of church engagement, donor development or the foster parent pipeline.
• Sensitive information about children and families had to stay out of marketing systems entirely.

The System We Built

Stakeholder data model. We used contacts for people and renamed companies to Organizations for churches, schools, government offices and partner groups. A multi-select Stakeholder Role property lets one person hold several roles, and custom record layouts group the fields each team needs.

Church hierarchy with association labels. HubSpot doesn’t support true nested hierarchies, so we modeled regional network, church and church group relationships with custom association labels like Church and Church Group, Pastor and Staff. We built a live three-level example in the portal so the team could test it against their most complex real relationships before importing.

Data mapping and import. We worked through the team’s 175-field mapping worksheet, decided which Raiser’s Edge data belonged in HubSpot, and set conventions: one person per contact record (no combined spouse records), a naming suffix for custom properties, organizations imported before contacts, and a small clean first import before the rest.

Email migration and segmentation. We replaced Mailchimp tags with HubSpot subscription types and properties, so contacts manage their own preferences and exclusions work reliably. We also renamed lifecycle stages to fit a ministry rather than a sales team, and wrote a deliverability plan for growing send volume safely after the move.

Enterprise and custom objects. After the organization upgraded to Enterprise, we led a custom objects working session on two real use cases:

• An in-kind needs registry, where supporters pledge items like car seats and bedding for specific locations. We recommended tracking each pledge as its own record in a custom object with its own pipeline, rather than using deals, so in-kind gifts stay out of revenue reporting while still supporting receipts.
• A church “household” object to answer questions like how many foster families or event attendees come from one church and all its groups.

We also helped the team decide when a custom object isn’t needed. After narrowing donor data from about 60 fields to 10–15, the team chose to protect those fields with Enterprise permissions instead of building a new object.

How It Works in Practice

• Each person has one record, whether they give, volunteer, attend church or are moving toward foster care licensing.
• Churches and their groups are linked, so staff can see a church’s whole network from one record.
• Email audiences are built from subscription types and properties instead of one-off tags.
• New custom objects go through a written spec before anything is built, starting from the reports leadership wants.

When the team asked about collecting referral documents through a HubSpot form, we flagged that uploaded files get a URL even when the field is hidden. They removed the upload field and are moving sensitive documents to a secure transfer process.

 

• 35,000+ contacts migrated from Mailchimp and other sources into one CRM
• 98.93% delivery rate, 0.03% spam report rate and 0.20% unsubscribe rate on the first high-volume HubSpot sends
• Mailchimp tags replaced with a maintainable subscription and property structure
• A church and partner hierarchy that supports roll-up reporting
• A documented approach to custom objects and field permissions on HubSpot Enterprise

Nonprofits whose supporters play several roles at once, like donors who also volunteer or churches with many groups, and who need HubSpot to reflect those relationships without losing track of what’s sensitive.