Integration Architecture: Connecting Salesforce to Your Email, Events, and Payment Systems

Ohana Focus Team
1 day ago
13 min read

Ask almost any nonprofit that has moved to Salesforce what surprised them most, and a version of the same answer comes up: the platform isn’t just a donor database. It’s a hub. And like any hub, its value depends entirely on what you connect to it.

Most organizations don’t struggle with Salesforce itself. They struggle with the ecosystem around it—figuring out which email platform to integrate, how to get event registration data flowing in automatically, and whether their donation processor is actually talking to their CRM or just creating duplicate records. These aren’t trivial questions. The wrong integration decisions lead to manual data entry, conflicting records, and staff who stop trusting the data altogether.

In this guide, we'll walk through the practical integration architecture we see working well for nonprofits at every size: how email, event, and payment systems connect to Salesforce, what the data flows actually look like, and the decisions that determine whether an integration saves time or creates new headaches.

Why Integration Architecture Matters More Than Platform Choice

It’s tempting to treat integration as an afterthought—something to figure out once the core CRM migration is complete. In practice, integration decisions shape almost everything about how Salesforce performs for your team.

When integrations are designed well, Salesforce becomes the authoritative record of every donor relationship: every email opened, every event attended, every gift made. Staff see a complete picture without switching between systems. Reporting reflects actual donor behavior. AI tools like Agentforce have rich, accurate data to work with.

When integrations are poorly designed (or missing entirely), the opposite happens. Development officers maintain separate spreadsheets because Salesforce doesn’t have the data they need. Gift acknowledgments go out without the context of whether the donor also attended your gala last month. Analytics are incomplete. The promise of a unified donor view goes unfulfilled.

The good news is that the core integration architecture for most nonprofits is more straightforward than it appears. Most nonprofit technology stacks—regardless of specific tool choices—require integrations across three domains.Three primary integration categories cover the majority of organizations’ needs, each of which has well-established patterns that work reliably:

Email and marketing automation: How donor communications, campaign tracking, and engagement data flow between your email platform and Salesforce
Event and registration management: How registration data, attendance records, and event-based engagement sync into donor profiles
Payment processing and giving platforms: How donation data, recurring gift schedules, and payment status reach Salesforce in real time

Each category has different data flow requirements, different integration maturity levels across vendors, and different failure modes to watch for. We’ll walk through each in detail.

Email and Marketing Automation Integration in

What Good Email Integration Actually Looks Like

The goal of email integration isn’t just getting emails to send from Salesforce—it’s creating a two-way data relationship where engagement behavior informs donor management, and donor data informs communication. A well-integrated email platform should deliver the following:

Bi-directional contact sync: New donors created in Salesforce appear automatically in your email platform. Unsubscribes and bounces in your email platform update Salesforce contact records immediately.
Engagement data in Salesforce: Email opens, clicks, and conversion events write back to the donor’s Salesforce record—not just as aggregate stats, but as individual activity records you can report on.
Segmentation driven by Salesforce data: Your email platform pulls lists based on Salesforce fields—giving history, program interests, engagement scores—rather than requiring manual exports.
Campaign attribution: When a donor clicks an email and makes a gift, that gift is attributed to the campaign that drove it.

Platform-Specific Considerations

The three platforms we see most frequently in nonprofit stacks each have meaningful differences in how they integrate with Salesforce:

Mailchimp offers a native Salesforce integration that handles basic contact sync well. It works reliably for organizations sending straightforward email campaigns and needing engagement data at the contact level. The limitations appear at the segmentation layer: dynamic segments based on complex Salesforce data require workarounds, and the integration doesn’t support all Salesforce object types. For organizations with simple email programs, it’s adequate. For organizations doing sophisticated donor segmentation, it hits a ceiling.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (now called Marketing Cloud Engagement) is Salesforce’s own email platform and integrates natively at the deepest level. Every Salesforce object, field, and data relationship is available for segmentation and personalization. The tradeoff is cost and complexity: Marketing Cloud is enterprise-grade software designed for organizations running sophisticated multi-channel campaigns. For smaller nonprofits, the price-to-value ratio often doesn’t work.

Pardot/Marketing Cloud Account Engagement sits in the middle ground: deeper Salesforce integration than Mailchimp, less complex (and less expensive) than full Marketing Cloud. It’s designed for B2B marketing automation but works well for major donor cultivation workflows where you’re managing longer engagement journeys with individual prospects.

Constant Contact, HubSpot, and Klaviyo all offer Salesforce integrations of varying quality. The integrations tend to be reliable for contact sync but vary significantly in how well they write engagement data back to Salesforce. Before committing to any platform, it’s worth testing the specific data flow you care about most—not just whether the integration exists, but whether it writes data where you need it.

The Data Flow That Actually Matters

The most common integration gap we encounter isn’t missing contact sync—it’s missing engagement data. Organizations successfully sync donor contact information to their email platform, but email engagement behavior never makes it back to Salesforce.

This matters more than it appears. Email engagement—open rates, click patterns, content preferences—is some of the most predictive data available for identifying donors approaching lapse, donors ready for an upgrade ask, and donors who need a different communication approach. When that data lives only in your email platform, it’s invisible to your development team and unavailable to AI tools analyzing donor health.

When designing email integration, explicitly map the engagement data you want in Salesforce and confirm the integration supports it—before committing to a platform.

Event and Registration Management Integration

Event attendance is one of the strongest engagement signals in donor management. A donor who attended your annual gala for three consecutive years is telling you something important about their relationship with your organization. A major gift prospect who attended a behind-the-scenes program tour is demonstrating the kind of depth of interest that precedes significant giving.

Despite this, event data is siloed in most nonprofits. Registration lives in Eventbrite or a similar platform, while attendance records exist in a spreadsheet someone maintained during check-in. Neither makes it into the donor’s Salesforce profile in a way development officers can act on. The result is that a donor attends five events over two years, and the gift officer walking into their first face-to-face meeting has none of that context.

Integration Approaches by Platform

Fundraise Up is the platform we most frequently recommend when organizations want event registration and donation processing unified under a single Salesforce integration. Many nonprofits run ticketed events—galas, luncheons, golf tournaments—where the “ticket” is itself a donation, often with a charitable deduction component. Fundraise Up handles this use case natively: ticket purchases flow to Salesforce as Opportunities with the correct gift type, tax-deductible amount, and campaign attribution, all in real time. The result is that a donor who buys a gala table and also makes a general gift during the event has both transactions on their Salesforce record within seconds—no batch import, no manual reconciliation. For organizations where events and giving overlap, this is a meaningful operational advantage over maintaining separate event and payment platforms with their own independent Salesforce integrations.

Eventbrite is the most common standalone event platform in nonprofit stacks and has a reliable Salesforce integration for pure registration use cases—conferences, volunteer orientations, community programs where no payment or a nominal fee is involved. Out of the box, it handles registration sync: new registrants create or update Contact records in Salesforce. Actual attendance marking requires additional configuration; registration and attendance are different data points, and only the latter is truly meaningful for donor engagement purposes. Plan for that distinction when designing the integration. If your events also collect gifts or major ticket purchases, consider whether a combined platform like Fundraise Up better serves your needs.

Salesforce Experience Cloud/Communities allows organizations to build native event management entirely within Salesforce—eliminating the integration challenge by keeping everything in one platform. This works well for organizations running frequent donor events where the development team needs real-time visibility. The tradeoff is setup complexity and cost compared to a standalone event tool.

In-person events with manual check-in remain common even with integrated platforms. The practical solution: use a mobile-friendly attendance app that syncs to Salesforce in real time, rather than maintaining a paper or spreadsheet check-in that requires manual data entry afterward. Several lightweight tools handle this well and the data latency difference matters: real-time attendance sync versus end-of-event batch upload changes what development staff can do with the information.

The Campaign Member Model

Salesforce’s Campaign object is the natural home for event integration data. When an event is set up as a Salesforce Campaign, registrants and attendees become Campaign Members with statuses that reflect their engagement: Invited, Registered, Attended, No-Show.

This model creates several downstream benefits that standalone event data can’t provide:

Development staff can filter donors by event attendance directly in Salesforce reports—no export required
Agentforce agents can factor event attendance into donor engagement scoring and stewardship recommendations
Campaign ROI reporting connects attendance to subsequent giving, making it possible to measure which events actually drive donor upgrades
Multi-year event attendance history is visible on each donor record, giving gift officers meaningful context for cultivation conversations

Getting to this model requires thoughtful integration design, but it’s the architecture that turns event data from an isolated record into a meaningful piece of the donor relationship story.

Payment Processing and Giving Platform Integration

The Highest-Stakes Integration

Of the three integration categories, payment and giving platform integration carries the highest stakes. Donation data errors—duplicate records, missing gifts, incorrect amounts, and failed recurring gift processing—have direct financial and compliance implications. The integration needs to be reliable, near-real-time, and auditable.

It also needs to handle more complexity than most organizations initially anticipate: one-time gifts, recurring gifts, gift upgrades, failed payment recovery, pledge fulfillment, refunds, and tribute gifts all require different handling. An integration that works for simple one-time donations may fail for recurring gift management.

Native Integration vs. Third-Party Processors

The most reliable payment integration is one built by the giving platform itself, where the vendor has invested in making Salesforce sync work correctly across all gift types.

Fundraise Up is among the strongest examples of this category. Its native Salesforce integration handles the full giving lifecycle: one-time gifts, recurring schedules, payment failures and recovery, donor-initiated upgrades, and tribute gifts. Data flows to Salesforce in real time, and the integration creates both Contact and Opportunity records with the right field mapping. For organizations prioritizing online giving conversion and recurring donor growth, the depth of this integration is a meaningful differentiator.

Stripe and PayPal direct integrations can work for organizations with simpler giving programs, but require additional middleware (typically Zapier or a custom API connection) to get data into Salesforce correctly. The reliability of these integrations varies significantly based on implementation quality, and they typically require more ongoing maintenance than purpose-built nonprofit giving platforms.

Critical Data Fields for Giving Integration

Regardless of platform, a reliable giving integration must consistently deliver the following:

Gift amount and date: Obvious but worth stating—these must be accurate and consistently formatted
Gift type: One-time, recurring installment, pledge payment, in-kind—each requires different accounting and acknowledgment handling
Payment method: Credit card, ACH, check, digital wallet—relevant for payment processing analysis and some acknowledgment requirements
Campaign attribution: Which campaign, appeal, or channel drove the gift
Recurring schedule details: For monthly donors: frequency, amount, next payment date, total installments
Donor-supplied designations: If donors can designate gifts to specific programs, that data needs to reach Salesforce accurately
Contact matching logic: How the integration identifies whether a donor already exists in Salesforce versus creating a duplicate record—this is where most integration failures originate

That last point deserves particular emphasis—duplicate record creation is the most common and most damaging failure mode in giving integrations. A donor who has given twelve times over eight years appears as two separate records because their email address changed between gifts. Development staff split their time between the two records, giving history is incomplete on both, and neither record accurately reflects the relationship.

Before finalizing any giving platform integration, explicitly document and test the contact matching logic. Confirm how the integration handles email address changes, name variations, and organizational donors with multiple contacts.

Integration Architecture: Putting It Together

The integration architecture that works reliably for most nonprofits is a hub-and-spoke model: Salesforce sits at the center as the authoritative record of donor relationships, and each connected system—email, events, payments—writes data to and reads data from Salesforce through well-defined integrations.

The Hub-and-Spoke Model:

Email platform: Reads donor segments from Salesforce. Writes engagement data (opens, clicks) back to Salesforce activity records.
Event platform: Writes registration and attendance data to Salesforce Campaign Members. Reads donor contact data for confirmation emails.
Giving platform: Writes gift records (Opportunities) and payment data to Salesforce in real time. Reads donor history to inform giving form personalization.
Salesforce (hub): Holds the authoritative donor record. Agentforce agents monitor the unified data and orchestrate stewardship actions across all channels.

This model avoids the most common integration failure: systems that talk directly to each other, bypassing Salesforce. When your email platform reads from Eventbrite directly, or your giving platform feeds data to your email tool without touching Salesforce, you lose the unified donor view—and you create reconciliation problems that compound over time.

Middleware: When You Need It and When You Don’t

Middleware tools—Zapier, Make (formerly Integromat), and Workato are the most common—fill gaps between systems that don’t have native integrations. They can be valuable, but they’re also a frequent source of integration fragility.

These are cases where middleware works well:

Connecting niche tools that don’t offer native Salesforce integrations
Creating simple automation triggers (new event registration → Salesforce task for a follow-up call)
Bridging legacy systems during a transition period

Here are some cases where middleware creates problems:

Replacing a purpose-built integration with a generic connector—the native integration almost always handles edge cases better
High-volume data flows where Zapier’s task limits create throttling or gaps
A complex data transformation requiring logic that the middleware tool can’t reliably execute

Generally, it's advisable to use native integrations wherever they exist and are mature. Use middleware for specific gaps, not as a primary integration strategy.

Testing and Monitoring Integrations

Integration failures are often silent. A connection that worked during setup can degrade over time—an API key expires, a field mapping breaks when a vendor updates their data model, a sync job starts failing without generating visible errors, etc. Every integration in a nonprofit’s stack should have:

A defined test protocol run at initial setup and after any platform updates
Monitoring that alerts staff when sync jobs fail or data volumes fall outside expected ranges
A designated owner who is responsible for the integration’s health—not just the initial setup
Documentation of the data flow, field mapping, and contact matching logic so that troubleshooting doesn’t require reverse-engineering a configuration from scratch

This is less exciting than selecting platforms, but integration maintenance is what separates organizations whose donor data stays clean and reliable from those who find themselves re-cleaning data every eighteen months.

Common Questions and Concerns

Do We Need All Three Integrations at Once?

No. In fact, trying to stand up all three simultaneously is one of the more common implementation mistakes. Each integration has its own complexity, and troubleshooting is much easier when you’re isolating one system at a time.

The phased approach that works well: start with giving platform integration (highest stakes, highest immediate value), then add email integration once giving data is flowing cleanly, then event integration. By the time you’re connecting event platforms, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how Salesforce is working in your organization and what your event data architecture should look like.

What If We’re Already Using a System We Don’t Want to Change?

This is a realistic constraint, and the answer is usually: stay with what’s working and invest in the quality of the integration rather than platform replacement. A well-integrated existing tool almost always outperforms a poorly-integrated new one.

The exceptions are tools that genuinely can’t integrate reliably with Salesforce—either because the vendor hasn’t invested in the integration, or because the integration is too shallow to be useful. In those cases, the platform conversation is worth having. But start with an honest assessment of integration quality before assuming you need to change platforms.

What About Donors Who Exist in Multiple Systems With Different Information?

This is the data quality problem that integration surfaces rather than creates—the inconsistencies existed before, they were just hidden in separate systems. The integration decision is about contact matching logic: what fields does the integration use to determine whether an incoming record matches an existing Salesforce Contact?

Email address is the most common matching field, but it’s not perfect—donors change email addresses, organizational contacts share addresses, and data entry errors create variations. Most mature giving platform integrations allow you to configure matching rules and handle exceptions. Spend time on this configuration before going live. It’s much easier to establish clean matching logic upfront than to merge duplicates after thousands of records have been created.

What About Wealth Screening and Prospect Research Tools?

Wealth screening platforms—DonorSearch, iWave, WealthEngine—are a fourth integration category worth planning for, especially for organizations with major gift programs. The integration pattern is similar: the screening tool appends capacity and affinity data to Salesforce Contact records, where it’s available to development staff and Agentforce agents.

Most wealth screening tools offer Salesforce integrations of reasonable quality. The data flow is generally one-directional (screening tool → Salesforce), which makes it simpler to implement. The main consideration is refresh frequency: how often does screening data update, and does that frequency match your prospect cultivation pace?

Actionable Next Steps

If you’re planning a Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce migration or evaluating your current integration architecture, here’s a practical checklist to get started:

Audit your current tool stack. List every platform that touches donor data—email, events, giving, wealth screening, and payment processing. For each, document whether it currently integrates with Salesforce, what data flows, and how reliably.
Identify your highest-value integration gap. Where is donor data most fragmented? Where do staff spend the most time on manual data reconciliation? That gap is where integration investment delivers the fastest return.
Evaluate integration quality, not just integration existence. Before committing to a platform, test the actual data flow. Does engagement data write back to Salesforce? Does contact matching work reliably? Does the integration handle your specific gift types?
Plan integration maintenance, not just integration setup. Define who owns each integration, what monitoring is in place, and how your team will know if a sync fails.
Phase your implementation. Don’t try to connect everything at once. Start with the integration that matters most to your fundraising program, get it working cleanly, and build from there.

Partner with Ohana Focus

Schedule your free consultation today.

Integration architecture is one of the decisions that determines whether your Salesforce implementation actually delivers on its promise—or becomes another system your team works around.

At Ohana Focus, our mission is to help nonprofits design integration architecture that works by selecting the right platforms, building the right connections, and creating the data flows that give development staff the unified donor view they need. Our approach is practical and honest—we’ll tell you when an existing tool can integrate well enough and when it’s worth switching, rather than defaulting to whatever creates the most implementation work. Our integration services include:

Integration architecture assessment and planning
Giving platform selection and Salesforce integration
Email platform integration and engagement data mapping
Event platform configuration and Campaign Member setup
Data deduplication and contact matching strategy
Integration monitoring and ongoing support

We’re not just software vendors—we’re strategic advisors who help you build the connected ecosystem your fundraising program needs.

About Ohana Focus

Ohana Focus is a certified Salesforce consulting partner specializing in nonprofit CRM strategy, data migration, and integration architecture. We help organizations successfully and seamlessly move from Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce and build connected technology ecosystems that make Salesforce genuinely useful for development teams.

We’ve helped nonprofits of every size navigate the real-world decisions of platform selection, integration design, and change management. We understand both the technology and the fundraising operations it supports. Whether you’re in early planning, mid-migration, or looking to improve a Salesforce implementation that isn’t delivering expected value, we provide the expertise and honest guidance to move forward effectively.