GoFundMe wanted to grow the amount of repeat and referral business they received from their most high-profile, high-impact customers.
High-profile accounts are supported by the GoFundMe VIP Experience team. The team needed to establish a consistent workflow to efficiently manage and nurture their complex, high-touch relationships.
VIP Experience had never leveraged a true CRM and relied primarily on Google Workspace tools, such as Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Gmail, to manage these accounts.
Charlie Earl, Manager, VIP Experience, describes the situation:
“Our aspirations were to grow repeat and referral business. But we recognized that we needed a better tool to manage and document these relationships.
Relying on Google Workspace tools to manage these accounts created visibility issues among the VIP Experience team and other teams, especially Partnerships.
Both teams frequently interacted with the same customer accounts. Not knowing what the other team was doing made coordination and collaboration challenging.
“Conversations would move out of Zendesk into Gmail and then we’d lose sight of them,” says Charlie. “Or someone would go on vacation, and we wouldn’t know if the Partnerships team had already spoken to a contact.”
Many customers use the GoFundMe platform for their annual fundraising campaigns. The VIP Experience team wanted to proactively engage with these customers but found it difficult to schedule and coordinate their efforts with the tools available to them.
“When is a good time to approach customers about activating a campaign for the next calendar year? Where and how do we set reminders to check in with them?” says Charlie. “These subtleties would sometimes fall through the cracks because we didn’t have universal clarity around who was responsible for what and when.”
Charlie and the VIP Experience team decided to implement Sales Hub and the HubSpot CRM platform to manage its most high-profile accounts. The Partnerships team supported the VIP Experience team’s decision to choose HubSpot because they also saw the value in cross-team visibility.
“Part of our role is to support the partnerships side of the business,” says Charlie. “And the Partnerships team helped us get the internal buy-in we needed to adopt HubSpot.”
The team chose HubSpot partly due to its excellent out-of-the-box configurability, which simplified and sped up implementation.
“There's an approachable simplicity to HubSpot,” says Charlie. “That's not to say it isn’t robust—it certainly is and then some—but the intuitive setup and controls, combined with the excellent support resources within Knowledge Base, gave us the confidence that HubSpot was the right provider for our needs.”
Today, the team has new visibility into email communications with customers and prospects thanks to HubSpot’s Gmail integration. As a result, the team can approach each new customer interaction with the complete context of prior interactions, which is helping to strengthen customer relationships.
“The relationship-building impact was pretty noticeable within the first three to four months,” says Charlie. “We no longer step on one-another’s toes when engaging with customers and look foolish in our communications.”
The contact management capabilities of HubSpot have also eliminated confusion around account ownership, enabling the team to become more consistent in their outreach.
“We assigned accounts, built out an outreach calendar, and set our cadence,” says Charlie. “Those were the things that excited the team—and we saw an immediate return.”
Today, the team prioritizes their outreach based on parameters they’ve defined within HubSpot.
“We catalog relationships by ‘type’ and ‘cause’ to better prioritize the opportunities we most want to pursue, nurture and expand,” says Charlie. “We’ve become much less reactionary and more proactive.”
The team also uses the HubSpot deal pipeline and other features to attribute wins to internal points of contact and identify loss reasons.
With all these pieces in place, the VIP Experience team is much more successful in nurturing repeat and referral business.
“The deal functionality has been a true game-changer in helping us track referrals and retain repeat business tied to annual campaigns. ” says Charlie.
The VIP Experience team is working more efficiently than before with HubSpot features such as email templates and snippets. These features also help keep GoFundMe’s brand voice consistent.
“Having real-time access to standardized language snippets has improved our continuity of voice, and templates have been instrumental in streamlining our proactive outreach and testing language to increase open and response rates,” says Charlie.
The associate companies feature also allows the VIP Experience team to automatically create and associate companies with contacts—another big time saver.
Implementation of the HubSpot CRM platform also helps the VIP Experience team collaborate and partner with other GoFundMe teams, including the Partnerships team and even the News team.
“Our News team is tasked with amplifying stories and getting press placements,” explains Charlie. “They use HubSpot to see who’s supporting the relationships they want to amplify and survey the most recent exchanges to get the context for the relationship—and avoid bothering customers with questions they’ve already answered.”
With the HubSpot CRM platform, the VIP Experience team has increased GoFundMe’s repeat and referral business by 180% in just nine months.
Today, repeat and referral businesses comprise a higher portion of GoFundMe’s total business, rising from 11% to 32%, a 191% increase.
“Having satisfied customers come back to us, year after year, has been a huge win,” says Charlie. “It supports our mission to help people help each other.”