AJAX S-Control for creating opportunites from contact

Last Updated on Thursday, 8 December 2005 05:41 Written by Steve Thursday, 8 December 2005 05:41

In Salesforce.com, you can create an Opportunity by clicking the “New” button on the Contact’s Opportunity related list. You are taken to a blank Opportunity form, and when you save it a Contact Role is set for that Contact. There are a few suboptimal things about the process:

I have to pick the correct record type

We have multiple Opportunity record types, so I have to go in and select Gift each time I create a new Opportunity

The Opportunity name is blank

We have a standard naming convention for Opportunities. Steve Andersen 2005 Donation is how a gift from me would look. We have to type that in every time we create a new Opportunity

The Contact Role is blank when the Opportunity is created

We use Contact Roles for acknowledgement on the gift. If I make a donation, I’m set as the Donor role. When we report, we can total up all the Opportunities on which a Contact was a Donor, and that’s their total giving. We have other Roles, like Soft Credit, that we use for thanking folks, but not giving the same credit as Donor. Because the system sets the Role to blank, I have to go in and change that after I save the Opportunity.

So, I created an S-Control and installed it as a Custom Link on the Contact page layout. When I want to create a new Opportunity, I click that Custom Link. An Opportunity is created with the correct name based on my naming convention, and the Contact Role is set correctly. I land on the edit page for this new Opportunity, and I can change anything that I need to.

There are no custom fields necessary to use this S-Control, all you have to do is change the record type id in the S-Control code to match the id you want to use for gifts. Install the S-Control in a similar fashion to what I showed in the earlier walk-through, but create a new Custom Link under Customize | Contact instead of a Web Tab. Whiz-bang easy…

Individual Donors in Salesforce.com

Last Updated on Thursday, 8 December 2005 01:42 Written by Steve Thursday, 8 December 2005 01:40

As I’ve been writing, Salesforce.com is being used as CRM in the nonprofit setting. It’s a flexible platform that can be molded to meet nonprofit business practices pretty well. But there is one major underlying architecture issue that causes some problems:

Salesforce.com is designed to support relationship development between businesses, not between businesses and people. To use current lingo, Salesforce.com is B2B (business to business) not B2C (business to consumer).

To get Salesforce.com to work for nonprofits, who cultivate individual donors, members, and volunteers in the B2C model, we have to use one of two work arounds:

Pretend each individual in the database is a company

For each individual in Salesforce.com, you create a company with the same name. In Salesforce.com you interact with the company, which is really the individual

Benefits:

• B2B is what Salesforce.com does best, so you can leverage all the power of the system
• This is the likely direction that Salesforce.com will go to address this problem in future releases
• Might be able to handle householding by using existing account hierarchy functionality

Drawbacks:

• Double data entry for every individual
• Each individual can only be connected to one company, so if you associate an individual with their own company, you can’t associate them with a real company, like their employer
• Hard to do things like soft credits and memorials

Create a bogus company where all your individuals reside

One fake company called “Individual” is created. Every individual donor is associated with that company.

Benefits:

• Flexibility to associate users with employer
• Easy to do soft credits and memorials

Drawbacks:

• You miss out on some of the features that rely on accounts
• Have to use custom objects to do householding
• You can end up with a bazillion individuals in that one account

I’ve chosen to roll out my org in the second model primarily because we do a lot of work with nonprofits in the B2B model in addition to our B2C work. I think most nonprofits fit into this hybrid model: every group I’ve seen gets grants from foundations. That’s a pretty clear B2B process.

This is definitely my least favorite current work around in Salesforce.com. So, I’m going to try to spend some more time looking at the first scenario, and see if there aren’t some relatively easy customizations I could build to eliminate the data entry problem.

Quick demo of online donation S-Control

Last Updated on Wednesday, 7 December 2005 09:33 Written by Steve Tuesday, 6 December 2005 05:08

I did a screen capture walk-through of using the process and S-Control I created for online donation importing into Salesforce.com.

We’re experimenting with this technology as a way to do trainings and best-practices work. As my first attempt, this is pretty unpolished, but gets the point across. Take a look and let me know what you think!

[Update]

Here is a screen capture walking through the steps to get this up and running in your Salesforce.com instance.