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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…

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 8th, 2005 at 5:41 pm and is filed under CRM, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.