National Center for Family Philanthropy

Years before we worked with them, the National Center for Family Philanthropy were talked into a custom integration between their WordPress website and HubSpot, where Hubspot was an intermediary system connecting information to Salesforce, their primary database. Rather than a powerful, integrated digital platform that made member management easy, they were stuck with a costly, complicated, and unreliable system.

Their website also suffered from a classic situation where its feature set grew beyond WordPress’s capabilities. 

With a network of over 500 philanthropic families representing more than 3,000 individuals, their clunky digital ecosystem was hampering their ability to support their members and required excessive staff time to manage. The challenges and complexities of the philanthropic sector are at their peak. Revamping NCFP’s communications infrastructure was critical.

We leveraged Drupal’s structured data and deep integration with Salesforce to free NCFP from a costly HubSpot subscription. The new site is built for NCFP’s unique membership model and is easy for staff to update and maintain. Staff no longer waste time wrestling with cumbersome workflows, focusing instead on supporting family foundations.

Simple Membership Management

Family foundation members come from a variety of backgrounds, ages, and technical familiarity. Their membership experience needs to be as intuitive as possible. That meant designing a website that was welcoming and easy to navigate. 

Under the hood, Drupal’s robust integration with Salesforce is at work, but to the user it’s all the same system. For NCFP staff, it’s easiest to manage membership details in Salesforce. The sync between Drupal and Salesforce means no double entry or risk of outdated or conflicting data. 

Seamless Event Registration 

NCFP offers events to a variety of audiences. Some are for the general public, others are members only, and some are only for a subset of members. Drupal’s flexible user permissions system and taxonomy allowed us to build an Events platform that shows the right information to the right person, depending on their role and the event’s audience. 

Site visitors who aren’t yet members are encouraged to join NCFP and can do so easily.

Registering for an event submits their data to Salesforce, informing the NCFP team of the interests and activity of their members. Having information about event registrants flow directly into Salesforce also allows NCFP to target communications about upcoming events to the correct audience.

Flexible Gated Content

Resources abound for philanthropic families on the NCFP website. The needs of a family philanthropy are numerous and complex so the best support truly is becoming a member. Resources serve as a great starting point for answering common questions, but some resources are best used in tandem with membership. 

To encourage and grow membership, we built two gated content workflows. 

NCFP staff can gate any Resource with an email form. This is used for flagship resources that NCFP wants to share with the philanthropic sector. The email gating allows NCFP to see who is accessing the resource to better understand their audience. They can also use the contact information submitted in the form to follow up with those that are eligible to join as members.  The user clearly understands that sharing their email address is the currency for the insights found in the resource they’re downloading. 

The second form of gated content restricts the resource to only NCFP members. If someone is not yet a member (or forgot to sign in), they are shown a message prompting them to login or join to access the resource.

A Healthy Digital Ecosystem for a Healthy Online Community

By prioritizing tools that value interoperability, we upgraded NCFP’s digital ecosystem to one where the tools talk well to one another. With NCFP’s platforms talking to one another, NCFP staff now spend their time talking with their members.