Convio for Salesforce
Convio has built a connector between Convio and Salesforce.com that is scheduled to go into general release in mid January. The folks at Convio were kind enough to do a demo of the connector for our nonprofit Salesforce.com implementers group today.
The demo showed a Convio installation that was set up to synchronize with a Salesforce.com instance on the nonprofit template. The synchronization focused on three things:
- bi-directional syncing of Contacts (people)
- taking online donations given at a Convio site and inserting them into Salesforce.com
- creating Convio Groups from Salesforce.com Campaigns
I’ll take each of these areas in turn.
Contact Syncing
Syncing of people is bi-directional between Convio and Salesforce. Contacts created in Convio can be mirrored in Sf.com, and vice-versa. Changes to a Contact in either system will flow through to the other.
The syncing happens as a batch job which is kicked off by the user clicking a button on the Convio web administration site, or it can be scheduled to run up to once a day. When the sync is run, new Contacts are created, modified ones are changed, and a report of what happened is generated.
To deal with possible dupes there is a dupe resolution interface that shows Contacts that are possible matches from the other system and provides the user with an interface for making the one record that will replace the two. This is similar to the Salesforce "Merge Contact" interface.
Online Donations
When a web user makes an online donation at a Convio website, they create a Contact record for themselves and a transaction record. The Contact record would sync as described above, and the transaction would come over as an Opportunity with a Contact Role to the Contact in question. If it’s a recurring gift, the payment comes over to Salesforce and is related to a Recurring Gift object. All future payments on that pledge will be connected to the Recurring Gift object as well, so they are all visible in one place.
A really cool feature with the integration is that you can map Convio Campaigns to Salesforce.com Campaigns. You can map Convio Campaigns to Salesforce Campaigns, pick record type for all donations to that Campaign, and select the Fund. All donations that come in to that Convio Campaign will be flagged to the Salesforce campaign and get the right record type. Pretty nice control.
Convio Groups
Convio sends mass email, and it does it via groups. Democracy in Action works the same way. In the integration, you can create a Group from a Salesforce.com Campaign. You can then send email to that Group. This is a one-time pull, but you can schedule the group to be updated periodically. This is similar to the way Vertical Response models group sends.
Customization
Convio indicated that what they’ve built can be customized for a fee. So, if you did things differently, or had some custom fields that were very important, you could hire them to customized the integration to capture those for you. This would probably be treated as setup costs, which of course would vary depending on what you wanted.
What’s Currently Missing
The main thing missing from the integration is the Action component. Convio allows you to set up online action pages for petitions and the like. I would love to see Actions be connected to Salesforce Campaigns, with new Contacts dropping on those Campaigns with a chosen Member Status.
Allowing mapping of Convio data to Salesforce field would be really nice. Integrations are great, but if you can’t collect the data you want to collect, they are of limited value. Building a mapping interface like we’ve done with our Plone Form Gen adapter for Salesforce would make this a very flexible integration.
Real-time syncing would be nicer than batch syncing, of course.
I would love to see a knocked down admin interface designed to be I-Framed inside a Salesforce Tab, much like Vertical Response.
Conclusion
The integration was pretty slick. There was a problem in the demo syncing a donation made from the web, but that happens in demos. If the nuts and bolts of the integration can be trusted to work as described, this would be a great system for someone using Convio and Salesforce.com. Most of the groups I work with don’t see Convio as being in their price ballpark, so I don’t expect to do any implementations. Groups that have the budget and use both systems will likely find it very interesting.
