Not every organization should migrate their donor CRM to HubSpot. If your current platform is working well, your team is comfortable in it, and your main bottleneck is somewhere else — don't migrate for its own sake. Migration is a significant undertaking that makes sense when the limitations of your current system are actively costing you: in staff time, in data quality, in reporting capability, or in the inability to connect your communications and fundraising in one place.
The organizations that see the most value from migrating to HubSpot are typically those with growing contact databases, increasing communication sophistication, and a strategic need for unified reporting across fundraising, programs, and outreach.
What Data Actually Matters
One of the most useful things you can do before any migration is decide what not to bring. Most donor databases contain years of accumulated records — partial contacts, one-time event attendees from 2011, duplicate entries, and soft credits that were never cleaned up. Migrating everything preserves the mess.
The data that matters in a migration: active donors from the past three to five years, complete gift history for those donors, contact preferences and communication history, recurring giving details, and major gift prospect notes. Everything else should be evaluated deliberately, and much of it should be left behind.
The Three Phases of a Nonprofit CRM Migration
Map: Before any data moves, you need a complete mapping of how your source system's fields translate to HubSpot's contact, company, and deal objects. Bloomerang and HubSpot organize donor data differently — what lives as a constituent record in Bloomerang needs to be thoughtfully reconstructed in HubSpot's object architecture. This phase also defines what custom properties need to be created in HubSpot to capture data that doesn't have a native home.
Clean: Data cleaning happens before migration, not after. This means deduplication, standardization of field values (state abbreviations, phone number formats, gift codes), and a decision on every record that falls outside your defined migration criteria. It's the least exciting part of the process and the most important.
Migrate: The actual data transfer uses a combination of HubSpot's import tools, the API, and in some cases custom Python scripts for complex data transformations. A well-planned migration runs in stages — a test sample first, fully validated before the complete dataset moves. Cutover happens when both teams have signed off on the data quality in HubSpot.
Common Risks and How to Manage Them
Duplicate contacts are the most common migration problem. They usually stem from the source system having multiple records for the same person — different email addresses, name variations, or both a household and individual record. A deduplication strategy before migration prevents this from becoming a HubSpot problem.
Lost donation history is the second most common concern. Giving history needs to be migrated as associated deal records or custom transaction objects — not just as a property on the contact record — so that attribution, segmentation, and reporting work correctly in HubSpot.
Broken segments happen when list logic that worked in the source system doesn't translate directly to HubSpot's active lists. Every key segment should be rebuilt and validated in HubSpot before you rely on it for communications.
What Post-Migration Support Should Include
A migration isn't done when the data moves. It's done when your team is operating confidently in the new system, your key workflows are running, your dashboards are validated, and the source system has been formally decommissioned. That typically takes 30 to 60 days after cutover and requires dedicated support from your implementation partner.
Considering a migration from Bloomerang, Salesforce NPSP, or another donor CRM? Request a Migration Assessment from Tapp Network. We'll map your current data structure, identify the complexity tier, and give you a clear picture of what the process involves.
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