When people think of RevOps, one of many things might come to mind - perhaps it’s “something to do with sales and marketing.” Or perhaps “that one report-building guy that we see for five minutes on the all-hands before he retreats into the CRM shadows for the rest of the month.” Maybe even “...what are reb offs?” (We’ve all been there - sitting at the thanksgiving table and hoping no one asks you what your job is, knowing you can’t give an intelligible response.)
What I’m guessing you don’t think of is “increasing a nonprofit’s efficiency and transparency so they can fundraise more, spend less, and work faster.” Certainly can’t blame you there - to most nonprofits, these are buzzwords that more likely belong in an MBA classroom than a mission-driven organization. But when it comes to HubSpot for nonprofits, the implementation of RevOps fundamentals can be the missing gear to help them run like a well-oiled altruistic machine.
Read on below to learn about our recommendations for nonprofits looking to use the RevOps framework to make their CRM (and the world) a better place.
So glad you asked! For starters, you’re not alone in feeling like this term can be a bit ambiguous - RevOps is a relatively new idea, really only coming to the forefront in the last decade or so.
Think of it like this - you’ve probably got someone working to bring new donors to the website, and you’ve probably got a team doing outreach (maybe in the field at events, maybe over the phone) to land the white whale donations. You’ve probably also got someone on the back end crunching the numbers so you can maximize impact while still keeping the lights on.
RevOps is the unifying factor that brings this whole donor journey together, ensuring that these teams are connected and have access to clean data that will bring in donations and provide insights into how the organization can improve. Thinking about your processes through a RevOps lens will empower you to step into your donors’ shoes and create the best experience possible for them, leading inevitably to better outcomes. And as a great man once said, “Doing something is even better than thinking about it.” - Isaac Jacobson, 2025
Here’s the truth - even if you’re won over to the idea that RevOps for nonprofits can help you fundraise successfully, chances are that your team isn’t sold yet (because selling is a for-profit thing, and we’re not about that life). Before we get into any of the good stuff, it’s important to make sure that we win over the rest of the difference-makers so the whole organization is riding the same RevOps wave.
While every nonprofit looks a bit different, we’ve found that the same general benefits apply to the teams from which they’re comprised. Take a look at this diagram listing out the benefits of RevOps to find out how you can get the thumbs up across the board:
Marketing Team
Sales & Fundraising
Finance & Accounting
Executive Team
When building a RevOps superteam, you’ll want to take a number of personnel factors into consideration - odds are you don’t have a RevOps team member (if you do, hats off to you), so this group should be made up of stakeholders whose daily processes will be affected by the creation of this taskforce.
You’ll want to include a variety of perspectives and teams in this group to ensure that the good of the whole organization is taken into account - imagine your taskforce as the Avengers, with your various superpowers all playing a part in defeating the evils of a messy CRM (maybe without Tony Stark on this one - we want billionaires donating to your cause, but could do without the attitude and explosions here).
The above list of folks from whom you’ll want buy-in should give you a good jumping-off point, but beyond having the approval of your compatriots you’ll want to make sure the right people are in on every meeting and project. Consider the below factors when you’re assembling this dream team:
Maybe you’ve got all the above bases covered, maybe there are only clear answers to a few of the above - the key question you’ll want to answer here is essentially does this team consist of team members that cover the whole Buyers Journey, from the first marketing click to the processing of the donation?
Once you can say “yes, a thousand times yes” to the above, you’ve got your squad of RevOps professionals! (And like any good RevOps professional, they might not even know what that means. Again, “stuff related to sales and marketing” should suffice.)
Yes yes, we know - “Lifecycle Stages” sounds like more of the same business jargon you thought you would be safe from in the nonprofit world. But here’s the truth - this is the foundational project on which the rest of your revenue operations for nonprofits (RevOpsNonProfs?) work will rest. Getting this right is absolutely critical to ensuring that you have a handle on how a stranger becomes a loyal donor, so let’s start here.
Put simply, Lifecycle Stages are the key points on a person’s journey with your organization as they move from an unengaged contact to a high-value donor who gives repeatedly to your organization. This will look a little different for every nonprofit, but below are the stages that we believe are relevant to most fundraising-focused teams:
Contact: A Contact that exists in the system but has not yet interacted with us
Lead: A Contact that has subscribed to our newsletters or attended an event but not donated
Opportunity: A Contact that has not yet donated but is actively talking to our team about donating
Donor: A Contact that has donated to us
High-Value Donor: A Contact that has given to us over a determined threshold (over X number of times, above $Y total lifetime donations, etc.)
Consider the crucial moments that take someone from the first to the last stage. What conversion rates (“X% of Leads became Opportunities, Y% of Opportunities became Donors”) do you want to be able to report on? When do handoffs between various team members - marketing to fundraising, for example - occur align this timeline?
Below are a few additional key points on setting up your Lifecycle Stages:
Setup: Setting up Lifecycle Stages in HubSpot is done under Settings -> Objects -> Contacts -> Lifecycle Stages. Head to that view to create the stages you need. You can then create lists that include any filters you want to use to identify when a Contact should be in a stage. Finally, create workflows to move those Contacts through each stage.
Contact/Company Sync: Think through whether you want to sync your Contact and Company Lifecycle Stages as well - if I am a donor from RevPartners, should the RevPartners Company record move up to the Donor stage as well?
Stage Progression Rules: We recommend that you configure your settings and workflows to prevent Contacts from moving backwards or skipping stages. See this video for more information on how to do so!
Lifecycle Stage Reporting: One of the main benefits of setting up your Lifecycle Stages is being able to see where the bottlenecks are in your process so you can increase conversion rates and get more donations. Use funnel reporting in HubSpot’s Reports tool to develop conversion reporting that will increase transparency.
Once you’ve got the Lifecycle Stages conversation checked off, the nonprofit revenue operations train has left the station! You’ll now be able to track donors as they progress through your acquisition process and spot areas of improvement with much greater ease.
The only thing worse than cold calling is cold calling people who aren’t going to donate. How can you minimize the pain of being rejected (at least from a CRM perspective)? The answer is simple: by creating a system that tells you who is most likely to donate! And it was from this fear of being hung up on that Lead Scoring was born. (Cue the “2001: A Space Odyssey” music.)
A good Lead Score will give you a quantifiable way to compare the quality of your Contacts and prioritize your outreach based on two key areas:
Fit Score: How well this Contact’s descriptive information fits your ideal/most likely donor
Behavior Score: The extent to which this Contact’s actions indicate an interest in your cause
The Lead Score is a simple average of these two values: Add Fit and Behavior Scores, divide them by two, and you get Lead Score. This number should equally weigh the Contact’s descriptors and behavior to give you a good approximation of their relative likelihood to donate, allowing your team to sort for the Contacts with the highest Lead Scores and spend their time accordingly.
Your next question is probably something along the lines of “This all sounds great in theory, but where do I even start with putting together a good Fit/Behavior Score?” (or maybe your question was “who will win the 2025 NBA Finals?” the answer is, of course, the Cleveland Cavaliers. You heard it here first.)
Every nonprofit’s Lead Scoring formulas will look a bit different, both on the specific criteria and the values that add up to the final number. With that said, we’ll include a few points below that we have found are useful for most nonprofits on both the Fit and Behavior side of things. If you already have an ICP (no, not Insane Clown Posse - although that would be a cool Ideal Customer Profile) figured out, be sure to include those traits in your scoring methodology.
Fit Score
Behavior Score
You’ll now want to think through two questions related to the above (and any other metrics you think would be relevant to your Scores).
The answers to these questions may not be clear at first, and that’s perfectly okay. There are really two ways for you to go about determining the proper formula:
One key difference between a for-profit and nonprofit Lead Scoring system is that the for-profit is probably using their formula to acquire new customers - you may primarily be using yours to cause existing lower-level donors to upgrade or become repeat givers. Think through what you want your score to accomplish and configure the values accordingly.
In truth, creating a good Lead Score requires a LOT of experimentation - it will take a lot of adjustments made over at least a year’s time to land on an accurate predictor of donation activity. But that’s fine - after all, slow and steady wins the race! (I guess in this case, the tortoise is you fundraising successfully and the hare is... the opposite of that.)
In a RevOps context, the biggest difference between nonprofits and for-profits (aside from what comes before the word “profits”) is where the focus may lie in the above Lifecycle Stages - chances are, most for-profit companies are dialed in on acquiring new customers and working to retain if not upsell the existing ones.
For many nonprofits, on the other hand, acquiring boatloads of smaller-denomination donors is more of a marketing play than a “sales” one. Odds are, your fundraising team is primarily concerned with turning minor donors into major ones, with new donor acquisition being somewhat of an afterthought.
In other words, sales reps at for-profit businesses often spend their time chasing after both new and existing accounts, while your fundraisers may have a book of existing donors that they work with on a regular basis instead of throwing a line out into the open ocean.
This is a feature, not a bug - there are only so many hours in the day, and your time is better spent calling people who you already know are likely to donate rather than throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing if anything sticks. In other words, most of your Fundraising Team’s focus will be on the last few Lifecycle Stages - Donor and High-Value Donor - and less so on the pre-donation Stages.
This means that the biggest question you’re trying to answer is some version of the following: “how do I organize and segment my donors so I’m not staring at a list of thousands of Contacts with no idea who’s who?”
This is where Donor Status comes to the rescue - you have Lead Scoring to tell you how to prioritize your Contacts, so the next step is splitting them into various categories for list-making, running outreach campaigns, and reporting on the victories that are undoubtedly headed your way.
Below are four ways we recommend you segment your donors in order to create a cleaner, easier-to-use CRM. Think through the specific filters you would want to use to define each value and use these triggers as your starting point for the workflows that set these properties:
Donor Level
Donor Maturity
Donor Frequency
Donor Activity
Once you have your workflows configured to move Donors through these four properties, you should have a much easier time splitting your donors into categories and organizing activities in your HubSpot portal. (Want some help setting up those workflows? Give us a shout below - we’ll show you how it’s done!)
Regardless of whether you’re shooting for large donations made after a long period of courting the donor, tons of small donations made touchlessly on your website, or some combination of both, you’ll need to know what it takes to bring a donor from A to Z (most likely B, C, D, E... you get the picture). Figuring this out is more than just keeping a mental list of to-dos that you think will help close the deal.
You’re probably getting tired of hearing this, but every organization’s pipelines will look a little different - think through the specific steps your Fundraising Team goes through when reaching out to, connecting with, and closing on donors. If you were playing hopscotch, where are you putting your foot down on the path to 10(million dollar donations, hopefully)?
Two important things to keep in mind here:
Take a look at the below three pipeline suggestions for some good jumping off points!
Solicited - these are the donations with active involvement from your Fundraising Team. You’ll probably have more stages here than on Unsolicited Deals, and you will (hopefully) be dealing with larger denominations.
Unsolicited - these are the touchless donations that are likely coming from your website, a third-party partner, or even that ancient communication system known as “the mail.” You didn’t have to work this deal for the money to come in, but it’s probably a smaller donation than you would expect to get via your Solicited deals.
Corporate - this pipeline will likely be the most similar to a normal B2B sales process of the three, and is reserved for any Corporate Partnerships your team is working that will result in a cash donation (any other kinds of sponsorships or partnerships should probably be dealt with via a separate process from the sales pipeline).
Maybe there are other pipelines that your organization specifically needs in order to segment donors and donation processes correctly that weren’t listed here (I’m not a psychic, you know) - if so, remember that your stages should be built around actions, not moments. Keep in mind, though, fewer pipelines is simpler, and simpler is better! You’re looking to run your sales... I mean, donation process like nonprofit clockwork, so always keep the goal of foolproofing in the back of your mind.
Having the data you’ll need to contact your donors effectively should be priority number one when you create their records in your CRM - having a name and an email address is a start, but you’ll need a bit more than that if you want to really bring the “wow” factor that gets those pens and checks moving. Adopting a nonprofit revenue operations mindset can really set you apart here - this is where data enrichment, the practice of gathering as much useful context on your Contacts and Companies as possible, comes in.
There are a few options here that you can use to get started:
Once you have decided on how you’re going to acquire the info you need, you can begin thinking through the data points that would be the most useful. Below are a few of our suggestions:
Contacts
Companies
Armed with the context that will allow you to reach your target contacts/companies effectively and with more personalized content, you’re ready to pick up the phone or hit the keyboard! Just remember, it’s one thing to know that someone works in the ESG sector and another to start a cold call with “How was Tommy’s baseball game last Saturday?” There’s a difference between appropriate personalization and Liam Neeson “I will find you” personalization.
Ahh, good ol’ deduplication - as my father used to say, “this is great, if you like being miserable.” Unfortunately for all of the RevOps folks out there, it’s an unavoidable part of our job - duplicates will be created, and duplicates that are created must be destroyed.
The bottom line here is that you can use HubSpot’s deduplication tool to eliminate your dupes manually if your volume is low enough - say, under 500 duplicates at any given time. Follow the below instructions to find the Manage Duplicates tool in your portal:
A quick note - if you have Operations Hub Professional or Enterprise, you can use HubSpot’s native deduplication tool to merge records in bulk - this is the most scalable solution you will find, as the price doesn’t go up based on how many records you have. With that said, Ops Hub’s customization options are not as extensive as some of the other suggested tools in the above article, so consider how much freedom you will need to make adjustments to your criteria when picking a tool.
It’s Spring Cleaning season and you’re ready to purge (not like the horror movie, more of a Mary Poppins “singing while organizing your room” kind of thing). There’s a problem, though. The best way to clear the way for better productivity is to remove the junk, but deleting things can be scary. How can you be sure that you’re taking the garbage out without scrapping valuable contacts and companies at the same time?
The answer is... filters. Lots and lots of filters. If you’re going to be sure that the baby isn’t going out with the bathwater, you’ll need to sufficiently sort out anything of value before hitting delete. Here are our recommendations for the filters you can use in HubSpot to minimize the chances that your potential donors will end up the recycle bin:
Basically, you’re confirming that there isn’t anything useful in these records that would even potentially enable you to contact them about making a donation. Maybe you need all of these filters, maybe you don’t - try messing with the above filters to see if they return enough records to warrant bulk deletion. If they do, you can proceed with the following steps before deletion:
Consider performing this process on a quarterly or annual basis - you’re better off cleaning up the junk frequently so it doesn’t interfere with operations.
Making improvements is impossible if you don’t know what is and isn’t working - even if you don’t like the results, knowing where you stand is itself a victory (that’s what I would tell my parents twice a year on report card day).
Transforming your system into a bona fide HubSpot for nonprofits machine is an iterative process, and anything you hope to optimize should be made as transparent as possible so you know where to focus your efforts. See below for some suggestions on reports you can build that will empower your team to become the RevOps black belts you know you’re destined to be:
Donor Status
Lifecycle Stages
Lead Scoring
Activity Reports
Revenue/Deal Reports
Marketing Reports
Whew! So many reports to choose from - and maybe some of those suggestions sparked an idea for others that you could create for your specific use case as well.
Our main suggestion here is that you use dashboards to your advantage, as having a hundred brilliant reports that you can’t organize or find means that you might as well not have them at all. Structure your dashboards around a common concept, whether that be Marketing Attribution, Fundraising Activity, Donor Conversions, or something similar that will tell you in big letters what it is that you’re looking at.
Pat yourself on the back - if you’ve made it this far, you’re well on your way to being a non profit revenue operations expert! The last thing to do is enjoy the privilege afforded to any expert in their given field - sit back and judge others.
Well, that’s sort of a joke. You’ll now want to turn your focus towards your organization as a whole and evaluate the progress of the entire nonprofit towards complete RevOps maturity, where you have a clear line of sight into your operations, what should be improved upon, and how you can go about doing that improving.
Below is the framework we use here at RevPartners to evaluate the progress of our partners towards achieving full transparency and maximizing effectiveness in all things revenue operations.
Click here for an article detailing the journey from Level 1 to Level 5 in more detail, or give us a shout and we’ll happily walk you through it!
Feel that sense of accomplishment? I hope so, at least - you’ve made it through your very first RevOps evaluation! Now it’s time to take off the training wheels and start prepping for your Tour de HubSpot - an ongoing process of observation, refinement and achievement that will allow you to fundraise more effectively and minimize the blockers standing in your way of making a difference.
Want to chat through how you can go about any of the above in more detail? Knock on our door with the below form - we’re happy to talk nonprofit revenue operations any time, any place!