Case Study: Richard Hugo House achieves unified data and streamlined membership, donations, and class registration with CiviCRM

CiviCRM is used not only for member and donor management, but also event ticket sales and class registration

Richard Hugo House, a Seattle literary arts center, faced fragmented data across separate systems for donations, membership, class registration, email and ticket sales. They selected CiviCRM—chosen for its Drupal integration, open-source licensing and relevant feature set—to consolidate these functions and reduce duplicative data entry while improving usability for staff and students.

Using CiviCRM (Contributions, CiviMail, CiviEvent and CiviMember), the team imported data from four disparate systems—including historical contribution, membership and event registration records—and consolidated member/donor management, class and student registration, email management, fundraising and special-event ticket sales. CiviCRM now supports roughly 40 classes per term with membership-based discounts and staggered registration, eliminated regular exports/imports between systems, and streamlined workflows and usability for staff and participants.

Richard Hugo House