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Case Study

CRM & Ticketing Transformation

High Desert Museum

The High Desert Museum has been a leading conservation steward in Central Oregon and the broader High Desert region.


The Challenge

Located in Bend, Oregon, the High Desert Museum has been connecting visitors to the history, cultures, art, and environment of the High Desert since 1982. With more than 130 acres and 10,000 feet of immersive exhibit space, the Museum is consistently ranked as Tripadvisor’s top attraction in Central Oregon.

But as the Museum’s growth accelerated, its legacy systems became increasingly unable to keep pace.

The Museum operated on Blackbaud’s Altru product, which required extensive manual workarounds and only provided limited visibility across departments. It was nearly impossible to manage constituent, membership, fundraising, and ticketing data within a single platform.

Compounding the issue, the Museum faced a hard deadline: the expiration of its Blackbaud contract and a mandatory two-year contract extension after that deadline. The Museum had only six months to evaluate alternatives, choose a new platform, migrate critical functionality, and train staff before the contract termination date, all without disrupting day-to-day operations.

To meet the Museum’s needs and timeline, we had to quickly answer four critical questions:

  1. How can we implement a scalable platform that supports the Museum’s growth and improves the supporter experience, however they engage?
  2. How can we migrate to that solution before the Museum’s Blackbaud contract expires without interrupting business continuity?
  3. How can we unite ticketing, membership, fundraising, and education program data within a single, user-friendly platform?
  4. How can we build marketing automations and reduce manual processes to improve efficiency across departments?
A guest looks out the window of the museum

Our Solution

We started with a comprehensive technology assessment evaluating the Museum’s operational workflows, constituent management needs, ticketing requirements, reporting goals, and future objectives. We then guided leadership and staff through a structured vendor evaluation process that compared nonprofit and cultural institution platforms.

With its strong museum operations capabilities, we aligned on layering Veevart on top of the Museum’s existing Salesforce instance to bring their most critical functionality together into one integrated platform.

We then worked closely with the Museum's staff to implement and integrate Veevart's extensive support package in the four months before their Blackbaud contract ended. This included:

 

Completing a full data migration alongside the Veevart team, including a comprehensive data cleanup to deduplicate records and ensure data hygiene in Salesforce.

Establishing reporting templates and dashboards to provide real-time insights across the organization.

Building robust fundraising functionality to support the Museum’s ongoing $40M capital campaign alongside their other fundraising initiatives.

Developing a custom camp registration framework that enabled a pre-registration lottery followed by automated sign-ups.

Streamlining operations across visitor services, development and administration teams, then supporting user adoption with training and documentation.

With a compressed timeframe, the Museum’s implementation required close coordination, rapid decision-making, and a phased deployment to ensure all critical systems worked correctly before they lost access to the Altru product.

The Results

The High Desert Museum successfully migrated to Veevart and Salesforce before their Blackbaud contract expired, avoiding costly renewal fees and operational disruption.

They now operate on a unified platform that centralizes membership, fundraising, point of sale and online ticketing, event operations, and constituent management within a single system. As a result, Museum staff can now see and make decisions based on the many ways their supporters engage.

With streamlined workflows and improved access to real-time reporting, Museum staff are also able to work more efficiently across departments, creating a seamless experience for visitors, members, and donors.

We continue to support the High Desert Museum’s growth with ongoing system optimizations, reporting enhancements, user support, and long-term platform strategy.

A Great Horned Owl in Central Oregon
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“Causemic consultants are extremely knowledgeable and easy to work with. They speak with patience and clarity, which is much appreciated by the team. They were invaluable in guiding us through a complex decision-making process, helping us ask the right questions and make informed choices. Our team repeatedly said - "we couldn't do it without them." We would absolutely recommend them.”

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Kia Sullivan
Development Director

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