The Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) hosts a variety of programs and events around the state of Minnesota. The MNHS had been working across two pieces of software, HubSpot and Tessitura, for some time. Each piece of software has its specific use: HubSpot as a CRM and Tessitura as event management and ticketing software.
Unfortunately these systems don’t talk to each other. That’s where Red Crow Digital came in.
The MNHS exists to share Minnesota’s history. They do this through creating and hosting events and programs, curating libraries and collections, and generally preserving the history of the area. The events and programs hosted by the MNHS are designed to engage, educate, and preserve the history of the state while also sharing it with the general public, whether they be residents of Minnesota or visitors. The MNHS is there to educate people, and because of that, it’s important for the MNHS to keep track of how people have interacted with the organisation so that they can continue to improve as well as market to people who have attended MNHS events or sites in the past.
The MNHS was using two different software systems to manage its events and customers: HubSpot and Tessitura. It’s not uncommon for businesses to use different software for different tasks. This is because software can be specialised and good at only a few things. In the case of MNHS, it was using HubSpot as its CRM while it was using Tessitura to manage its events and ticketing.
While this setup makes sense, it wasn’t optimal for MNHS’ operations because the two systems weren’t integrated with one another. There was no way for HubSpot to automatically take information from Tessitura and vice versa. Unfortunately, slimming down to using only HubSpot or Tessitura wasn’t an option. MNHS needed the features of both pieces of software.
Red Crow Digital’s job was to make it so that data from HubSpot went to Tessitura and, in turn, send data from Tessitura to HubSpot. In this way, the MNHS would be able to get increased functionality out of both pieces of software.
Red Crow Digital has plenty of experience with third party integrations, so this looked like it was going to be a fun project. After speaking with the MNHS, we got a great brief from the client. Basically, the client needed important email metrics from HubSpot to get into the Tessitura database so that the MNHS could target constituents meeting specific criteria. On the other side of things, they needed HubSpot contacts to be updated with Tessitura information about things like membership status, events, and more; this was so that users could be given the correct general marketing material.
Unfortunately, a lot of the data we needed to work with wasn’t typically available via Tessitura’s REST API. This meant we needed to create a number of SQL stored procedures on the Tessitura database and make them accessible as custom endpoints.
From there, we were able to access the custom endpoints from our Django application, which allowed us to facilitate the data migration between the two pieces of software; any data in one piece of software is shared with the other piece of software seamlessly.
While there’s a lot happening behind the scenes for MNHS’ data, employees and users don’t even see it. Data on either Tessitura or HubSpot is automatically updated via Google Cloud Run, which executes our Django migration script every fifteen minutes. To the end user, the data is “just there” in each piece of software whenever it’s needed.
This integration had a few unique challenges to it, but ultimately it was an interesting project for a great client to work with. If you have software that isn’t quite doing what needs to be done, speak to us about a better integration solution.