Why Haven't You Heard of HubSpot?

Museum executives are most familiar with sector-specific systems that have dominated the nonprofit CRM space for years. Platforms like Tessitura, Blackbaud Altru, Neon CRM, and email tools like Constant Contact are commonly used in museums for ticketing, fundraising, membership, and communications.

Tessitura, for example, provides an all-in-one solution for ticketing, donor management, and marketing, and is used by major institutions such as the Smithsonian and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Blackbaud’s Altru similarly offers integrated ticketing, membership, and fundraising features, and many mid-to-large museums rely on Blackbaud’s solutions.

Neon CRM is known as a budget-friendly choice for smaller organizations, covering donor management and events.

And for email newsletters, tools like Constant Contact or Mailchimp are practically ubiquitous.

But each of these familiar tools has a limited scope. Constant Contact, for instance, handles email outreach but isn’t a full CRM — it doesn’t tie emails to broader visitor engagement or donation data. Even the museum-specific CRMs have notable gaps. Users often note that Tessitura’s interface feels outdated and requires extensive training, or that its cost puts it out of reach for smaller museums. Blackbaud Altru provides robust ticketing and POS capabilities, but its email marketing tools are less advanced and complex customizations can be challenging. Neon CRM is easy to use and affordable, yet it offers fewer integrations with other apps and limited advanced analytics.

The result is that museums often end up using a patchwork of systems – one for ticketing/membership, another for email, maybe a separate donor database – to cover all their needs. These are the names you hear tossed about in conversations with your colleagues at other museums, so they’re naturally top-of-mind.

In contrast, HubSpot is rarely mentioned in these circles. There's a major awareness gap: museum professionals simply haven’t encountered HubSpot in their usual networking and research, not because it’s irrelevant, but because it’s traditionally been outside the museum technology bubble.

Meet HubSpot, the CRM Giant Outside the Museum Bubble

HubSpot is a well-established player in the CRM and marketing technology world – just not in the museum niche. It’s a platform known for its inbound marketing roots and has grown into an all-in-one system for marketing, sales, customer service, and content management.

In fact, HubSpot’s reach is enormous: nearly 258,000 organizations in over 135 countries use HubSpot’s software to manage their customer relationships. It’s a cornerstone tool in the corporate and small-business sectors, but you wouldn’t have seen it at museum tech expos.

Why?

Because historically, HubSpot focused on businesses, offering tools to attract leads, track customers, and automate marketing campaigns – worlds away from the donor databases and ticketing systems museums have used.

Yet, the very capabilities that made HubSpot popular in the business world are highly relevant to museums today. HubSpot is designed to centralize all your constituent data and interactions in one place, enabling what is essentially a 360-degree view of your audience. It’s built for relationship-building at scale: you can track a person’s engagement across email opens, website visits, event RSVPs, donations, social media, and more, all linked to one contact record. This unified approach is exactly what museums striving to deepen visitor and donor relationships could benefit from.

HubSpot wasn’t built specifically for museums, but it was built for the kind of multi-faceted engagement (marketing + outreach + service) that museums need to manage.

- Karen Senette, Nonprofit Tech Shop

Importantly, HubSpot has lowered barriers that might have kept nonprofits away in the past. It offers a basic CRM for free, with no limit on contacts or users – a stark contrast to many nonprofit CRMs that charge more as your database grows. Even its paid tiers are made more accessible for nonprofits through a 40% discount for 501(c)(3) organizations. This means a museum can start experimenting with HubSpot at no cost, and if it delivers value, scaling up is financially feasible (especially compared to, say, a six-figure Tessitura implementation fee).

HubSpot’s broad feature set covers many functions museums will recognize: email marketing (akin to what Constant Contact does, but integrated), contact/database management (like a donor CRM), fundraising tools (it isn’t a fundraising database per se, but it can track donations and supporter activity), event marketing and registration (through integrations or custom objects), and even a built-in CMS for managing website content. And it’s known for being user-friendly and modern in its interface – a point worth noting for teams that struggle with older software.

Finally, although HubSpot is new to museums, it’s not entirely unproven in the museum sector. A few pioneering institutions have dabbled in it.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, for instance, used HubSpot for marketing automation while still using Tessitura for ticketing/membership – they even invested in integrating the two systems to leverage the best of both. This example shows that museums can successfully bring HubSpot into their ecosystem and gain value from its capabilities (in Rock Hall’s case, to better market to their 600,000 annual visitors by using the rich data in Tessitura within HubSpot’s robust marketing tools).

HubSpot may be a “giant” outside the museum bubble, but there’s a growing realization that it can play nicely with museum operations and amplify what museums are trying to do digitally. Add the museums currently using our MuseumHub as an extension to HubSpot to manage all of their operations in one place, and the example has been set for museums looking to break out of the legacy museum technology bubble.

How a Full CRM Delivers Beyond Basic Contact Management

It’s important to distinguish between basic contact management and a full-featured CRM because not all systems that hold names and addresses truly empower your museum’s strategy. Many museums have gotten by with basic tools: perhaps an email list in Constant Contact or Mailchimp, a spreadsheet or simple database of members and donors, and maybe a ticketing system that holds visitor info.

These tools store contact information and facilitate single tasks (sending newsletters, tracking donations, selling tickets), but they don’t “talk” to each other in real time. If a visitor on your email list buys a ticket to an event, does your donor database know that? If a long-time member suddenly stops engaging, will your email tool alert you?

With siloed basic systems, the answer is usually no – staff have to manually cross-reference data, or worse, important insights are missed entirely.

A full CRM like HubSpot, on the other hand, centralizes and connects these dots. Rather than just being an email blast tool or a donor log, it becomes the unified hub for all interactions. For example, HubSpot can show that a particular patron opened your last five emails, clicked the link about your new exhibit, then made a small online donation – all in one timeline view.

This holistic picture is the foundation for personalized engagement. HubSpot’s strength is in capturing every touchpoint and enabling your team to respond intelligently (no more guesswork about who’s interested in what). In practical terms, that means a full CRM supports segmenting your audience dynamically, automating tailored follow-ups, and tracking outcomes end-to-end (from initial contact to event attendance to donation).

Most museum-specific systems historically did one part of this puzzle well (Tessitura for transactions, Constant Contact for email, etc.), but none alone provided the entire picture. That’s why many museums resort to a mishmash of tools to manage operations.

One tool for email, one for donors, one for events. The downside of that patchwork isn’t just inconvenience; it can lead to fragmented data and inconsistent messaging. A full-featured platform like HubSpot eliminates those silos by bringing all these functions under one roof. It acts as a single source of truth about your contacts.

Crucially, a true CRM doesn’t just store data, it helps you leverage it. HubSpot, for instance, has automation features to ensure no contact falls through the cracks. If someone fills out a “Volunteer Interest” form on your website, HubSpot can automatically tag them, add them to a nurture email sequence, alert the volunteer coordinator, etc., whereas a basic contact list would require manual action. The difference shows up in audience engagement: Organizations using integrated CRMs report higher engagement and retention.

This is the promise of moving beyond basic contact management to a full CRM: you gain the ability to treat each supporter as a “whole person” across all their touchpoints with your museum, and respond in a timely, informed, and personalized way.

How HubSpot Stacks Up Against Traditional Museum CRMs

Now, let’s directly compare the familiar museum-focused systems to HubSpot on key dimensions. The goal here isn’t to declare a “winner” across the board. Each system has its merits. Rather, we want to highlight where HubSpot offers fresh advantages (and where it addresses some common pain points of museum CRMs).

• Unified Data vs. Siloed Systems: Museum CRMs like Tessitura or Altru were built to unify certain functions (ticketing + donations + membership), which they do well within their scope. However, they might still require external integrations (for email marketing, website CMS, etc.) that result in data silos.
  
  HubSpot, with its custom objects and flexibility, can serve as an all-in-one repository for a wide range of data – from membership and donations to event attendance and even gift shop purchases – by either natively handling them or integrating smoothly. Unlike Neon CRM, which has relatively limited integration options for extending its capabilities, HubSpot boasts a vast marketplace of over 1,000 integrations and an open API, making it easier to connect with ticketing systems or other tools your museum uses.
  
  The bottom line: HubSpot is built to be a hub in your tech ecosystem, whereas older platforms can act more like islands that need bridges to other systems.

• Marketing & Engagement Tools: One of the clearest differences is in marketing automation and communications. Museums often supplement their CRM with tools like Constant Contact because systems like Altru have lackluster email campaign features HubSpot, conversely, was born as a marketing platform – it excels in email marketing, social media scheduling, landing page creation, and automated nurturing workflows.
  
  For example, you can design sophisticated email sequences for membership renewals or event follow-ups in HubSpot, with personalization tokens and behavior-based triggers, out-of-the-box. These capabilities far exceed what basic museum CRMs offer on the engagement front.
  
  Additionally, HubSpot provides built-in analytics on email performance, website traffic, and campaign ROI in real time. While some traditional CRMs might offer add-on marketing modules, they rarely match the depth of HubSpot’s marketing suite.
  
  This means museums on HubSpot can execute modern digital marketing strategies (segmentation, A/B testing, lead scoring, etc.) without needing third-party email services. It’s a significant upgrade in engaging today’s audience across multiple channels.
  
  
  

• Ease of Use and Adoption: A common complaint with legacy systems is the steep learning curve and clunky interface – staff often need extensive training to use advanced features. Tessitura, for instance, despite its power, is often criticized for an outdated, non-intuitive interface that can be daunting for new users.
  
  HubSpot takes a very different approach, prioritizing user-friendly design. Its interface is web-based, modern, and relatively easy to navigate (drag-and-drop editors, clear menus, in-app tips). As noted earlier, many museum users find HubSpot to be “the easiest to learn” among CRM options. This ease of use can translate into lower training overhead and faster team adoption. For a museum with a small staff (or volunteers helping out), this is crucial – you don’t want technology that only one database manager understands.
  
  HubSpot also has a huge online knowledge base and academy training videos which are helpful resources, whereas support communities for museum-specific software, while close-knit, are much smaller.
  
  In short, HubSpot’s UX lowers the barrier for your team to actually leverage the CRM fully, rather than using only a sliver of a complex system’s features.

• Flexibility and Customization: Every museum has unique processes – maybe you track fellows and research contacts, or you need to manage facility rental clients in the same system as donors.
  
  Traditional CRMs vary in flexibility: Tessitura is highly customizable but often requires specialized expertise to configure, and making changes can be costly or time-consuming (sometimes needing vendor consultants). Simpler CRMs like Neon are easier to configure but might not support complex use cases out-of-the-box.
  
  HubSpot strikes a balance by allowing extensive customization through its interface – you can add custom properties to contacts or even define entirely new object types (like “Artwork Loans” or “Exhibitions”) to track alongside standard contacts. The custom object feature means HubSpot can be molded to store museum-specific data without engineering heavy lifts. Moreover, automations (workflows) in HubSpot can be tailored to your processes with a few clicks, whereas achieving similar automation in older systems might require writing scripts or using additional tools. This flexibility is a big plus for museums with complex or evolving operational needs. As your museum grows or tries new programs, HubSpot’s CRM can adapt by configuration, rather than forcing you into rigid modules.

• Cost Structure and ROI: Budget is always a concern. Systems like Tessitura and Blackbaud often entail significant upfront costs (licenses, implementation, annual support). Tessitura’s pricing is known to be high enough that smaller museums can’t afford it, and even for larger ones, you pay for a lot of functionality whether or not you use it fully.
  
  HubSpot’s model can be more cost-effective: starting free and scaling up allows a pay-as-you-grow approach. Even at scale, the 40% nonprofit discount is a substantial savings. Additionally, consider the hidden costs illustrated earlier (integrating multiple systems, maintaining them, training staff on each, etc.). By consolidating tools, HubSpot can reduce those “duplicate tool licenses” and “admin overhead” costs.

  

  
  
  A museum IT director might ask: how many different renewal fees are we paying each year for various databases and software?
  
  With HubSpot, potentially many of those functions roll into one subscription. Of course, cost/benefit will vary by institution, but it’s important to recognize that HubSpot’s value isn’t just in feature comparison – it may also come from operational savings and efficiencies gained by unifying systems. (For instance, license savings and zero middleware needs, as the visual below suggests, can free up budget and staff time for mission-critical work.)

Modern Museums, Modern Solutions...and Why It Matters for Growth

It’s not just about having fancy new tech for its own sake – adopting a platform like HubSpot is a strategic move to tackle the evolving challenges and opportunities that modern museums face. Museums today are more than repositories of artifacts; they are dynamic centers of community engagement, educational programming, digital content, and global outreach. With these expanded roles come more complex operations and higher expectations from stakeholders (visitors, members, donors, boards).

Here’s how a modern CRM solution supports museums with big aspirations:

1. Engaging Audiences Across Channels: Today’s museum audience might discover you on social media, RSVP to an event online, donate through a crowdfunding campaign, and expect personalized communication throughout.

Legacy systems weren’t built with all these channels in mind.

HubSpot shines here by letting you manage email, social media ads, event registrations (via integrations), and even your website content in one platform.

For a museum looking to grow its visitor numbers or membership, this means your marketing campaigns can be more cohesive and far-reaching. You can run targeted digital ads and then see exactly how those people engage on your website or emails, refining your tactics quickly.

The result is more effective outreach and hopefully more visitors through the door. Growth often comes from reaching new audiences, and HubSpot is essentially a toolkit for digital marketing – something many museums are trying to improve.

2. Deepening Donor and Member Relationships: Growth isn’t just about new visitors; it’s also about increasing loyalty and lifetime value of existing supporters. Museums with growth goals are focusing on donor retention, membership renewals, and upgrading members to higher levels. A modern CRM like HubSpot provides data-driven insights and automation to excel at this.

You can set up a nurture stream that automatically sends content to members leading up to their renewal date, for example, highlighting the impacts of their support. Or use HubSpot’s lead scoring to identify which event attendees might be good prospects for membership.

The platform’s reporting dashboards allow you to track engagement and pinpoint where folks drop off. Armed with that info, your team can adjust strategy on the fly.

This is increasingly important: according to recent nonprofit trends, a majority of organizations plan to invest in improving donor engagement and retention, recognizing that keeping supporters is as critical as finding new ones. HubSpot directly supports this by making engagement measurable and manageable.

3. Streamlining Complex Operations: As museums expand programming, the operations get more complex – think of a museum that runs on-site exhibits, traveling exhibits, educational programs, an e-commerce store, and a cafe, all while also managing membership and fundraising. Siloed systems struggle to keep up with that complexity; staff might spend hours reconciling data between departments.

HubSpot’s benefit is in breaking down those silos and automating workflows, which is a boon for operational efficiency.

For instance, when the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame integrated HubSpot with its ticketing system, it allowed their marketing team to effortlessly use ticket purchase data (from Tessitura) in HubSpot to target campaigns. This kind of integration can save countless hours of manual data pulls and spreadsheet work.

Similarly, if your museum has multiple departments using the CRM, HubSpot’s user-friendly interface and centralization mean everyone from education to development is inputting and drawing from the same data reservoir, reducing duplication of work.

The platform can also automate internal notifications (e.g., alert the development officer when a high-value visitor makes their second visit this month). These efficiencies free up staff time – time that can be redirected to engaging with visitors or crafting great programs, rather than wrestling with tech.

In a growth scenario, you might not have the budget to double your staff, but a well-implemented CRM can make your existing team significantly more productive.

4. Data for Decision-Making: Growing a museum (whether in attendance, revenue, or impact) requires good decisions informed by data. Traditional museum CRMs have often been criticized for limited or hard-to-use reporting.

HubSpot, by contrast, offers customizable dashboards that give real-time snapshots of whatever metrics matter to you – be it weekly ticket sales, email engagement rates, membership join/drop trends, or fundraising campaign progress. Having this information readily accessible in one place means leadership can make quicker, smarter decisions. If an initiative is performing poorly, you’ll see it and can pivot mid-stream. If something is a hit (say, a particular email drove a lot of donations), you can double down.

This agility is crucial for growth; it’s the difference between driving forward with eyes on the dashboard versus flying blind.

Modern solutions like HubSpot also enable easy sharing of data insights – generating a board report on engagement, for example, might be as simple as a few clicks to export a dashboard, rather than a week of compiling data from different systems.

In short, better data -> better decisions -> better outcomes.

5. Scalability and Future-Proofing: A museum with ambitious goals needs systems that won’t hold it back. One advantage of a cloud-based platform like HubSpot is that it can scale with you. Whether you go from 10,000 to 100,000 contacts, or from 2 to 20 users, you won’t hit a wall – you just adjust your subscription.

This is in contrast to some older systems where jumps in data or users might require expensive upgrades or even switching platforms. Additionally, HubSpot is continuously updating its features (often releasing new tools annually), which means you benefit from ongoing innovation.

As museums venture into things like personalized mobile engagement or AI-driven marketing, you can bet HubSpot will be integrating those trends into its platform. By adopting it, you’re to some extent “future-proofing” your museum’s CRM capabilities. You won’t need a major system overhaul in a few years because HubSpot’s ecosystem will evolve with the times. That’s a reassuring thought for any museum director planning for the next decade of audience development.

Introducing MuseumHub: A Museum-Specific Layer on HubSpot

While HubSpot brings a ton of general CRM firepower, museums have unique needs and terminology that aren’t going to be pre-loaded in a business-oriented system.

This is where MuseumHub comes in.

MuseumHub is essentially a purpose-built enhancement for HubSpot – think of it as a museum-specific layer that sits on top of the HubSpot platform. Its goal is to give museums the best of both worlds: the modern, robust infrastructure of HubSpot plus pre-configured museum workflows and data models.

In practical terms, MuseumHub provides templates, custom objects, and integrations tailored to common museum scenarios. Right out of the box, it includes custom dashboards for things like membership renewals or school group visits, fields for tracking donor relationships in museum-specific ways (like linking a contact to a membership household or to specific exhibits they’ve sponsored), and automation recipes for typical museum workflows (for example, a lapsed member win-back email sequence, or an integration to pull in daily ticket sales from your point-of-sale).

Essentially, MuseumHub acts as a smart wrapper that makes HubSpot immediately relevant to museum operations without your team having to build everything from scratch.

The “layer” analogy is helpful – imagine HubSpot as the foundation (covering CRM, marketing, events, etc.) and a Museum layer on top that adds museum context. It focuses on key areas like Marketing, Donor Outreach, Events, and Team Enablement, aligning HubSpot’s features to museum departments and goals.

For example, under Donor Outreach, MuseumHub provides a pre-built structure for managing donor tiers, acknowledgment letters, and grant application tracking – things a museum development department handles routinely.

Under Events, it offers event registration pages that tie into HubSpot and workflows to follow up with attendees.

Team Enablement involves shared task queues or volunteer management tools so that your internal coordination is improved.

All of this lives on HubSpot, so the data still flows into the same central CRM; MuseumHub simply gives a museum-specific lens to view and act on it.

In short, if HubSpot is the engine, MuseumHub is the custom carriage built for museum passengers. It’s designed so that museums don’t have to reinvent the wheel when adopting HubSpot.

By providing industry-specific presets and features, it accelerates the onboarding and effectiveness of HubSpot for museum needs..

With MuseumHub, a museum gets a CRM/marketing system that speaks their language: membership, exhibits, donors, and programs, not just sales pipelines and customers. This can greatly reduce the implementation time and learning curve, making the transition to a new system far less daunting for your team.

Embrace the Future of Museum CRM

In wrapping up, let’s circle back to the question in the title: Why haven’t you heard of HubSpot?

For years, museum leaders operated in a tech ecosystem parallel to the corporate world, using tools built specifically for nonprofits and arts organizations. HubSpot, emerging from the marketing tech sphere, simply wasn’t on the museum industry’s radar.

But as we’ve explored, not hearing of it doesn’t mean it isn’t exactly what your museum might need next. The landscape of visitor engagement and fundraising is changing rapidly – and sticking only with the systems familiar from decades past could mean missing out on new, more efficient ways of working.

HubSpot represents a modern, unified approach to managing relationships that aligns with where museums are headed: more personalized outreach, more integration between departments, more data-driven strategy, and a greater need to do more with less (especially in terms of staff time and budget).

It’s not that the Tessituras and Blackbauds of the world are going away; it’s that museums now have options beyond them, and HubSpot is a compelling one.

We’ve seen how HubSpot can complement or even replace parts of the traditional museum CRM stack, bringing benefits in user experience, marketing capabilities, and overall efficiency. And with solutions like MuseumHub smoothing out the edges, adopting HubSpot doesn’t mean forcing a square peg into a round hole – it can fit naturally into museum operations with the right support.

For museum leaders with complex operations or aggressive growth goals, it’s clear that staying competitive and effective will require stepping outside the comfort zone of legacy systems.

This doesn’t necessitate abandoning everything that works; rather, it means building a tech stack for the future – one that might very well include an “outsider” platform like HubSpot at its core.

The irony is that HubSpot might have been a well-kept secret in the museum field precisely because it was so commonplace elsewhere. Now that you’ve heard of it, you can evaluate it with fresh eyes and an informed perspective.

Imagine breaking free from juggling multiple databases and instead having a single source of truth for all audience data.

Imagine your marketing emails, membership renewals, event invitations, and donor thank-yous all coordinated by one intelligent system that tracks and guides each interaction.

That’s the kind of streamlined, one-stack solution HubSpot promises – and as the saying goes, one stack can indeed save big (time, money, and headaches).

As museums seek to innovate in the visitor experience, so too should they innovate in how they manage visitor and supporter relationships. HubSpot, especially when combined with a museum-centric layer like MuseumHub, offers a path forward to do just that.