Handling People, Organizations and Households in Salesforce
I had a great conversation with Tucker MacLean last week about how to model the nonprofit world in Salesforce.com. Tucker is the Salesforce.com Foundation Fellow for 2006–he’s a Salesforce.com Coporation employee who is on loan to the foundation for a full year, with the task of doing what he can to make Salesforce.com more usable, accessible, and powerful for nonprofits. I’m really excited that he’s in this position–it shows a commitment by the corporation to improve the nonprofit version, and Tucker has tons of real-word experience with the application and getting it to work for real clients and their processes.
We talked about modeling gifts, membership, volunteers, and other processes, but the biggest issue facing nonprofits on Salesforce.com is how to model People, Organizations, and Households.
I have been raving about the flexibility of Salesforce.com on this site for quite awhile now. But nothing is completely flexible–some core architectural decisions are made in the development of all software, and those decisions have ramifications for how the software works. Long ago, Salesforce made the decision to focus on the model of sales where you are primarily selling to a business, and your interactions with other people are in suppoprt of that relationship between your business and the one you are selling to. So Salesforce.com does a great job for a shoe wholesaler who is selling shoes to retailers, but isn’t really built to help the shoe retailer sell to the individuals who come into the shop.
This focus on business to business sales (B2B) causes a problem for nonprofits. We deal directly with individuals when we get donations and memberships. We don’t really care what company these people work for–it’s our relationship with them as individuals that matters.
So what we really need is to have a Salesforce.com that is focused solely on business to individual interactions (B2I) and our worries would be over. We don’t care about B2B at all. Well, not exactly.
Ever apply for a grant from a foundation? You generally work with a grant manager during that process. They let you know what the foundation wants, and work with you to line up your plan with their giving desires. You then give them a proposal, which the grant manager takes away to closed door meetings, and a decision comes back to you. This is a classic B2B interaction. You’re working with a person, but you’re really dealing with the organization. Most nonprofits need to handle this kind of interaction.
So if we had B2B and B2I functionality, we’d be set, right? Still not quite there.
A nuance of that relationship with individuals that nonprofits have to deal with is households. If one donor lives with another donor, you want to be able to thank them as a unit, and send only one piece of mail to their residence. We want to know the individuals, and if they are tied to any other individuals in this way.
So let’s recap:
- Nonprofits need B2B for things like dealing with foundation grants. We need to work with people only in the context that they are employed by an organization we are trying to work with.
- We need B2I funcitonality so that we can work with individuals with no regard to whom their employer is.
- We have to be able to group those individuals in households for acknowledgement and direct mail
Oh, and here are a couple extra just to make things interesting:
- Ever had a foundation employee make an individual donation to your organization? My org has. We shold be able to support that.
- Ever had an individual donor work for a corporation who does matching gifts? We have. We should be able to know who an individual donor works for so we can make sure not to leave money on the table.
So, it’s really very simple when it comes down to it…it’s no wonder that nonprofits have trouble with CRM databases! The good news is that modeling all of these relationships is possible in Salesforce.com. I’m pulling togther a way to do it, and will write it up shortly. It’s really just gelling for me right now, but it feels like it will stand up to the light of day. We’ll see.
March 14th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Thanks, Steve. I think you’ve stated the need very well here. I’m eagerly awaiting your writeup – this is one of the big sticking points I had in my initial look at SF – if you can make this happen without too much pain, I’ll be that much closer to being able to recommend SF to some of my clients.
Whenever that happens, BTW, it’ll probably be mostly due to your work in clearing the trail of brush. Thanks for blazing it.
March 14th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Thanks Matthew. It’s been great to bounce stuff off people like you who have spent so much time thinking about these issues and supporting them in databases. I’m happy to get out the machette and see where I can go with it.
March 27th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
Hi Steve,
Great to finally meet you at NTC last week in Seattle! I wish we had more time to talk about some of the issues I’m now just getting to read here on your blog. I’ve been dealing with these same questions in implementing for our clients for the last year and a half and it is no easy thing to undertake!
In my experience, the best way to think of this is where the money needs to roll up to. So, if the individual is the one who makes the donation and needs to get the credit for that, then that individual needs to have his/her own Account record, regardless of whether they work at a Foundation which is also an existing account in the system. Then, Contact Roles should be utilized to attach the person’s contact record under their Individual account to the Foundation where they work with the Contact Role name as Employee under that Foundation account. Matches are a whole other ballgame, but essentially the relationships we’re needing to create can be handled by the Contact Roles and Partners related lists.
I wish I could say it was totally easy or intuitive out of the box, but that’s not necessarily the case. Did this come up at the Affinity Group last week? I am really regretting not making it to that!!
March 28th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
It was great to meet you to. I look forward to many conversations about the intricacies of modeling processes in Salesforce.com! “Follow the money” is a great way of thinking about things.
May 17th, 2006 at 6:30 am
Hi Steve,
We are a very small nonprofit in Michigan and have only recently been using Salesforce.com., so we are pretty new to the process. I read your thoughts on the B2B, B2I, and Householding capacities of SF (and lack thereof) and I understand you have created the Householding app as a response to that. Is it meant to address the B2I problems in SF too, or merely the Householding part? Im dying for a way to be able to connect an individual to multiple accounts (for fundraising issues as well as contact management issues)…does the Householding app help with this at all?
Rachel
May 19th, 2006 at 8:26 am
The householding app doesn’t do that but I (and others) use custom objects for tying people to other accounts and to other contacts. I use it for tracking who’s on the board of an organization, etc.
October 14th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
[...] Handling People, Organizations and Households in Salesforce: Here’s a run down of how I model the basics–people, orgs, and households. Salesforce.com is so flexible that we often do even these things differently! [...]
August 15th, 2008 at 9:59 am
hi Steve,
I’ve been following your postings with interested and wanted to know if you’ve resolved this question about accounts, contacts, individuals and households. Thanks!
June 29th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Hi Steve,
Would love to know if you did manage the model on ‘Handling People, Organizations and Households in Salesforce’? Looked around but couldn’t find it.
Many thanks,
Catherine Ngarachu
June 30th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Check out the Nonprofit Starter Pack: http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Nonprofit_Starter_Pack