HubSpot marketing-ops pod that doubled qualified donor inquiries in two quarters.
An embedded marketing pod - strategist, RevOps engineer, two-agent automation - rebuilt their HubSpot lifecycle, donor segmentation, and reporting on a quarterly cadence.
What we walked into.
A global humanitarian non-profit raising mid-six-figure gifts from individual donors. Their HubSpot instance had been bolted on over five years by three different agencies. Lifecycle stages were inconsistent across regions; donor segmentation lived in a senior fundraiser's head.
Inquiry volume was strong; conversion to a first conversation was not. The CMO needed the funnel rebuilt without pausing campaigns, and the data clean enough that quarterly board reports stopped requiring a week of manual reconciliation.
"We didn't need a new CRM. We needed someone to make the one we had behave. Six months later, the board report writes itself and the fundraising team is having more first conversations than ever."
Experience, data, activation, optimization.
Donor-facing forms, landing pages, and email templates rebuilt against a refreshed brand system. Region-specific without the duplication.
Lifecycle model rationalized across regions. Donor segments defined in HubSpot, not in a fundraiser's spreadsheet. CRM hygiene jobs running nightly.
Eleven lifecycle automations live: welcome, re-engagement, gift-acknowledgement, mid-level cultivation, lapsed-donor, event follow-up. Two agents handling routing and personalization under human review.
Quarterly board dashboard that builds itself. The fundraising team stopped exporting to spreadsheets to make decisions.
The engagement, phase by phase.
- 01Month 1
Audit + lifecycle redesign
Read the HubSpot instance end-to-end. Documented lifecycle, segmentation, and the gaps. Co-designed the new lifecycle model with regional fundraising leads.
- 02Month 2–3
Foundations + first three journeys
Rebuilt the property model, lifecycle stages, and segmentation. Shipped welcome, re-engagement, and gift-acknowledgement. Shut down 14 redundant workflows.
- 03Month 4–5
Agent-assisted journeys
Mid-level cultivation, lapsed-donor, and event follow-up - two AI agents handling personalization drafts and routing under human review. All copy approved before send.
- 04Month 6
Hand-off + run cadence
Quarterly board dashboard live. Pod transitions to a fractional run cadence - one strategist + one engineer, two days a month. Inquiry volume +2.1× quarter on quarter.
The stack and the pod.
- Marketing automation
- HubSpot Enterprise
- CRM
- HubSpot CRM (donor)
- Reporting
- HubSpot dashboards + Looker
- Agents
- Routing + personalization pods (custom)
- Forms / pages
- HubSpot CMS Hub
- 1× Marketing Engagement Director
- 1× RevOps engineer (HubSpot Solutions Architect)
- 1× Lifecycle strategist
- 1× Copy + brand lead
- 2× Agent engineers (routing + personalization)