Membership numbers you can actually count.
A non-profit for Australia’s senior women leaders, running its membership on estimates and spreadsheets. Now the renewals run themselves.
- Industry
- Non-profit professional association
- Platform
- HubSpot Sales, Marketing and CMS
- Scope
- Member data, Member Hub, workflows
- Project lead
Jayden Hellyar- Location
- Australia
01 The briefClean up the member data, rebuild the Member Hub members log in to, and automate the renewals, nominations and communications the team was doing by hand.
A CRM that nobody was left to run.
Chief Executive Women (CEW) is a membership organisation for women leaders in Australia. Its members, renewals, events and nominations all ran through HubSpot.
CEW could not say for certain how many members it had. Membership numbers were estimates, and staff kept the details that mattered in spreadsheets beside the CRM. Payments often came from a member's assistant rather than the member, which made them harder again to match to the right person.
Members felt it too. Logins failed and payments went wrong, and every complaint landed on a staff member to sort out by hand.
The know-how had left with one person. When CEW's HubSpot manager moved on, nobody in the team knew how to run the platform, and their existing partner looked after marketing and the website. The CRM side, where the members actually live, had no owner.
Three things CEW asked for
- Every member record in HubSpot. No spreadsheets on the side, and the same answer whoever asks.
- Logins and payments that work. A member can get in, pay and update their own details without calling anyone.
- Staff time back. The routine admin runs on its own, so the team spends its week on members.
Clean records first, then everything on top.
Three pieces of work, in the order they had to happen. A renewal reminder or a login email is only as good as the member record behind it.
Member data
One record per member, in HubSpot, that the whole team trusts.
- 30+ custom properties for membership
- Legacy Salesforce properties removed
- Thousands of duplicate contacts merged
- Key member fields standardised for reporting
- A workflow that tracks how long each person has been a member
Workflows and email
The admin that used to be done by hand, done by HubSpot.
- Multi-stage nomination workflows with approval paths
- A Leaders Program pipeline with its own forms and emails
- Automated login and email updates for members
- Key member communications sent automatically
Member Hub and billing
What members see, and what staff no longer have to chase.
- A redesigned Member Hub login page
- A HubDB Member Directory in place of a hand-kept table
- Recurring billing for $137K of renewals
- Live dashboards for membership status, events and attendance
The approach had three parts. First a data cleanup, to give everything after it a reliable base: duplicates merged and member information standardised. Then the member experience, rebuilt around better logins and automated communications. Last, custom workflows for the processes only CEW has, above all its nomination system, turning manual tasks into automated sequences.
The order mattered. Each layer reads from the one before it, so the member record had to be right before a renewal reminder, a login email or a nomination step could rely on it.
Five principles the build ran on
Save the team's time
Repetitive tasks automated, which is where the 29 hours a week came from.
Get the data right
A cleanup first, so HubSpot is the record everyone at CEW can rely on.
Simplify the complex processes
Nominations and renewals, with less admin in each.
Build for a non-profit
Every piece chosen for what it saves and what it costs to run.
Make it last
Built on HubSpot's standard tools, so CEW's team can keep changing it.
Four phases, data before anything else.
Clean data had to come first. Automating renewals on top of duplicate records would only have sent the wrong emails faster.
Data cleanup and organisation, Getting to one trusted record per member
- Properties built for membership. Custom properties shaped around how CEW actually tracks members.
- Old fields out. Legacy Salesforce fields removed, so nobody reports off the wrong one.
- Duplicates merged. Thousands of duplicate records combined into accurate member profiles.
- Information standardised across every member profile, so reports agree with each other.
Process automation, Finding the hours and handing them back
- Staff time treated as the scarce thing. We went through the admin processes looking for what could run on its own.
- Manual data entry, follow-ups and repeat tasks turned into workflows.
- The time went back to members, and to the work CEW exists to do.
Member experience, Logins and payments that stop generating support calls
- The Member Hub rebuilt, with the login issues fixed and payments simplified.
- Automated email updates so members keep access to their accounts.
- A redesigned login page with fewer errors and fewer support requests.
Custom workflows, The nomination process, moved into HubSpot
- Member nominations take multiple forms, approvals and committee reviews. That process used to need a lot of manual work.
- It now runs through HubSpot, start to finish, on workflows built for CEW's own steps.
Membership counted from the records, not estimated.
Members still tracked in spreadsheets?
29 hours a week, $75K a year.
29 hours a week comes to 1,508 hours a year, time the team now spends on members and on the work CEW exists to do.
Source 01
Data consolidation and reporting
We brought membership data into custom properties and built dashboards for membership status, events and attendance in place of spreadsheets.
10
hours a week, from dashboards in place of spreadsheets. Membership status, events and attendance now report straight from the member records in HubSpot.
Source 02
Data accuracy
We merged thousands of duplicate contacts and standardised the key member fields, so every member has one accurate profile.
10
hours a week, from one accurate profile per member. CEW used to estimate its membership numbers. Now it can count them from the records.
Source 03
HubDB updates and Member Hub fixes
We moved the Member Directory into HubDB and fixed the login problems that generated support requests.
6
hours a week, from fewer support requests. The redesigned login page has fewer errors, and the directory is no longer a hand-kept table.
Source 04
Privacy settings
We reviewed the portal's privacy settings and tidied them up.
3
hours a week, from the privacy settings review. With the other three sources, that makes 29 hours a week.
The 29 hours a week come to 1,508 hours a year, and that is $75K a year in cost savings. Renewal follow-ups for $137,262.50 of memberships now run on recurring billing, with nobody chasing them.
Behind the hours is the data: CEW can count its members from the records, and staff work from HubSpot instead of spreadsheets kept beside it. For a non-profit, that is time and money going back to the mission.
Who ran it
Jayden HellyarProject Manager
Led the data clean-up, the Member Hub and Directory rebuild, renewal and nomination automation, and dashboards.
Still chasing renewals by hand?
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