HubSpot ActBlue Integration
Hello Everyone!
I was wondering if anyone is willing to help me figure out how to integrate my Hubspot account with ActBlue.
I’m trying to create a custom app/script so that when somebody makes a donation on the site ActBlue, it triggers and sends that information to HubSpot.
Here isĀ documentationĀ on how ActBlue uses Webhooks.Ā I’d really appreciate any detailed steps or even a live help or walkthrough. Many thanks!
The short answer is:
The most common way to integrate ActBlue’s webhooks with HubSpot without a dedicated, direct integration is by using a third-party automation tool like Zapier or by building your own custom middleware hosted on a platform like Google Cloud Platform or AWS.
This custom app would receive the ActBlue webhook data, process it to match HubSpot’s contact/deal format, and then send the data to HubSpot using the HubSpot CRM APIs, specifically the Create or update a contact API and the CRM Association APIs to link the donation as a deal or custom object.
Alternatively, an excellent and cheap solution for a custom app is to use a server-side tagging setup like Google Tag Manager Server Side and a service like Stape to receive the webhook and then use the HubSpot Tag to create/update contacts and track events.
The long answer is:
Since ActBlue and HubSpot don’t have a direct, out-of-the-box native integration, you need an intermediary service to handle the data transfer and translation.
ActBlue’s documentation confirms you can set up a custom webhook endpoint using the ActBlue Default webhooks, which will fire for events like contributions, refunds, and recurring contribution cancellations.
Your custom app or service must provide a secure HTTPS URL for ActBlue to send the donation payload to.
For a custom application route, you’ll need to develop and host an application to act as this intermediary.
The steps involve: setting up an ActBlue Default webhook to point to your new application’s URL, designing your application to receive the JSON payload from ActBlue, parsing the donor information (email, name, address, amount, etc.), and finally, using the HubSpot API to check if a donor exists.
If the donor (Contact) is new, you’ll create a new Contact record in HubSpot.
If they exist, you’ll update their record.
Crucially, you would also use the ActBlue data to create a new Deal record or a Custom Object in HubSpot to log the donation itself, and then associate that Deal/Object with the Contact record.
A more technical and potentially lower-cost custom app approach is combining the ActBlue webhook with Google Tag Manager Server Side and a service like Stape, which offers a pre-built HubSpot Tag for server GTM.
In this scenario, the ActBlue webhook would send its contribution data to a server-side container endpoint, which you can host cheaply on Google Cloud Platform or easily through a service like Stape.
The server GTM container would then process the raw ActBlue data.
Within the container, you would configure the HubSpot Tag to take the donor’s email and other details from the incoming data and use the HubSpot API to execute actions like Create or update a contact or Track Custom Behavioral Event, which is an excellent way to capture the donation as an event within HubSpot.
This setup is highly versatile for real-time, event-based data synchronization and is cheaper than running a full, dedicated backend application for just this one task, especially when you consider the price of HubSpot Operations Hub Professional which is needed to trigger webhooks from workflows in all object types.
This server-side tagging method leverages the existing HubSpot API calls via the GTM tag to avoid developing and maintaining complex custom API logic, making it a very efficient and scalable solution.
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