Bridging Heritage and Innovation: Transforming American Ancestors Member Experience with CRM Integration

The Customer

Founded in 1845 in Boston, NEHGS (also now known as American Ancestors) is the nation’s oldest and largest genealogical society. NEHGS advances the study of family history by offering over 1.4 billion searchable records, world-class expertise, and a wide range of educational opportunities. It serves more than 25,000 members and nearly 400,000 online subscribers, helping people explore their roots and understand the rich tapestry of American heritage.

The Challenge

As the oldest and largest genealogical society in the country, the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) had built a legacy of service to family historians and the broader community. However, this legacy came with unique technical and operational challenges. Over the years, member and donor data became siloed across platforms—Tessitura for ticketing, membership, and fundraising, and disparate tools for communications and relationship management. This fragmentation made it difficult to gain a unified view of constituent engagement, personalize member outreach, and measure the effectiveness of digital campaigns.

NEHGS’s staff faced manual data entry, duplicate records, inconsistent reporting, and time-consuming processes for routine tasks like marketing communications, event management, and donor stewardship. As their membership continued to diversify and grow nationally and internationally, the organization needed a more robust, scalable, and efficient way to engage its highly invested community—without losing the personalized touch that makes NEHGS unique. Leadership also recognized the need to empower their team with modern tools and reporting, supporting smarter decision-making and digital innovation.

The Solution

Lynton’s approach began with deep discovery: collaborating closely with stakeholders across NEHGS to map business processes, key data flows, and the pain points experienced by both staff and members.

From this foundation, Lynton architected and delivered a custom integration between HubSpot CRM—a leading platform for marketing, sales, and service—and Tessitura, an industry-standard solution for arts and cultural organizations. This complex integration unified membership, donations, and ticketing data, enabling staff to view constituent journeys holistically for the first time.

The technical rollout included data mapping for critical fields, deduplication strategies, development of automated workflows, and rigorous quality assurance testing. Lynton provided change management support and training, ensuring the NEHGS team felt confident using the new tools and processes from day one. Ongoing support focused on continually optimizing integrations, troubleshooting, and helping staff leverage new features as NEHGS’s needs evolved. The partnership went beyond technology—Lynton consulted on digital strategy, member engagement tactics, and analytics best practices to help NEHGS maximize their return on investment.

The Results

The NEHGS integration was thoughtfully designed to meet stakeholder needs, enabling rich, two-way data flows between Tessitura and HubSpot for true digital transformation. Key syncs and automations included:

• Constituent Sync: Newly created or updated Tessitura constituents—capturing details like email, membership type, donation history, and program participation—automatically sync to HubSpot contacts. This ensures that the latest information on every member, donor, or event participant is ready for robust campaign personalization within HubSpot.
• Order to Deal Sync: Any changes to constituents’ Tessitura orders, including order number, dates, donation details, membership purchases, renewals, and special event tickets, are reflected in HubSpot as updated deals. Details like line items, transaction notes, and custom fees ensure sales and fundraising teams always have the full context for each supporter.
• Enhanced Data Flows for Stewardship: When Tessitura orders are linked or updated—such as membership upgrades, event registrations, or recurring donations—specific fields (cost, order type, description, date, and more) are synced to the related HubSpot deal record, keeping every stakeholder in the loop and eliminating data silos.
• Seamless Marketing & Engagement: With this real-time connection, the NEHGS marketing team can create targeted workflows, segmented campaigns, and conversion-focused forms in HubSpot, confident their constituent and transactional data remains in sync with Tessitura. No more toggling between systems or waiting on manual updates from different departments.

This integration empowers NEHGS to build highly contextual and personalized member, donor, and program engagement—leveraging everything from a new membership signup to a gala registration or a donation in memory of an ancestor. Marketing and fundraising staff can segment and reach specific audience segments, trigger nurturing workflows, and better understand each contact’s entire history with the organization, all within one central CRM platform.

As a result, NEHGS can now deliver tailored communications, improve donor and member retention, and ensure that every touchpoint—whether for a research consultation, seminar registration, or community campaign—is powered by accurate, up-to-date information. Data security and reliability are paramount, with every update seamlessly and securely reflected across both platforms.