Individual Donors in Salesforce.com
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.
December 9th, 2005 at 8:56 am
Steve,
Do you have a Salesforce configuration map that you and One/NW might be willing to share. I am confused about how you see using Accounts for both Individuals and Org/Businesses is an issue for you:
* Double data entry for every individual
S: If you create an SForce control this is easy enough.
* 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
S: We use partners to create Account to Account relationships - so that an individual’s account is affiliated with a Business Account (or any other type of account).
* Hard to do things like soft credits and memorials
S; For us a custom object takes care of this…relating two accounts together through an opportunity.
I get the impression your configurations of SFDC are much different…and would love to compare notes sometime.
Sonny
January 12th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
That’s interesting, especially the part about using Partners for relating people’s account to each other. I’m not real happy with any of the options for B2C in Salesforce.com–they seem like such kludges. SControls can help clean things up, but at the heart of it the underlying architecture is really limiting. I hope Salesforce.com can come up with better native functionality so we don’t have to go through these gynmastics!
January 14th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
[...] Indeed, this is very powerful. It has allowed me to greatly simplify the method I use to handle Households. I suggested that things might be better earlier, but they are much better than I thought. [...]
March 29th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
Just getting started with SF. You’re website R-O-C-K-S!! We are a small non-profit with 12,000 names, around 10,000 of which are members. We are super poor, and all we have going for us are very tech savvy volunteers. But we need SF to help us raise the money to get the consultant to help us set up SF. Ewww. What a catch22. So I have to do the roll out in house.
Our entire membership is broken down into chapters. I am working on getting the interface all set up. Of the different nonprofits I have seen, none of them have chapters.
Do you think my chapters should be accounts? And then set the members up with those chapters? Any suggestions?
March 29th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Thanks for the cheer!
It’s hard to say, but you might be able to handle chapters with a simple pick list on the membership Opportunity. I know it’s not very elegant, but that might be enough. Whenever you look at revenue in reports, you can decide if you want to see all, or some of the chapters. I don’t think having chapters as accounts will be very helpful to track membership…hope that helps!
April 3rd, 2006 at 11:15 am
Thanks for the advice!! I know this is lengthy, but I wanted you to know how I took your advice and implemented it. It’s so important to know when you good ideas are implemented for the good of others! like I said before, YOU ROCK!
The B2C vs B2B complication that you have articulated really does take place here. We work directly with individuals all the time - we sort of pride ourselves on that actually - ou lack of corporate sponsorship keeps us of of strings. So I had to grapple with how to deal with accounts vs. contacts. I really wanted to keep the salesforce philosophy of lead 2 contact, but had to deal with the annoying fact that an account would be created every time. I guess that is why I had to choose model A that you itemized, the one where each individual is an account. Thats so hard for non-profit folk, to make our supports “accounts” but I guess we all have to open our mind. More NP’s should have more business strategies implemented anyway!
I guess my model has each member having two side to them - their monetary side and their activist side. Thei monetary side is listed under their “account” and their activist side is listed under their “contact”. I had to modify account types to have a membership account type that would differentiate members from other organizations and non profit funders.
So my membership ‘account’ status - expire date, amount of dues, is all housed under “account” as well as their giving history, via opportunities, housed under “account”. Their volunteer data and personal info is housed under “contact” .
It seems to be the only way to model it so that I can take full advantage of leads. custom lead fields are mapped so that potential members are routed to membership account types, and membership contacts. Here is the cool part. Having to decide how to map donors to individual accounts actually changed our business model for the better. If someone was a member and wanted to make a donation, I couldnt map their account to a “donation type” of account, or it would overwrite the existing type for them in the system of “membership type”, and thus screw up my reports. So I’ve made the executive decision to always map donors to membership type of an account - making sure that each donor becomes a member. Can you believe we hadnt figured out we should be doing that already?
As for chapters, chapters are a custom object. here I took your idea and created a picklist. How wonderful! Now I can run reports of members in a chapter, because the reports function lets you show the contacts in an account. So I can run a report of all the contacts in all the accounts in a specific chapter. Woo hoo!
Our organization is completely membership based, and because we exist solely on the generousity of our members, we can’t afford expensive consulting companies. Hopefully, SF will allow us to make our donor management effective enough until someday we can do that. But until that day, your site is my bible!
Sincerely from all the feminists in New Jersey,
-Suzannah
NOW-NJ Foundation
April 3rd, 2006 at 11:16 am
(sorry, working on a donated laptop with really bad keys that sometimes don’t work. I’m not really that bad of a speller!)
April 3rd, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Thanks for the great write up of how you’re handling you complex practices. Salesforce.com is pretty flexible, no? And by the way, you should not worry about your spelling here–just take a look at any of my posts!
Glad you find my site helpful, thanks for adding great content!
April 4th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
You know what i want, I mean, REALLY want?
To be able to custimize the ’stay in touch’ fields. Can you IMAGINE what we could do with that?? Not only reduce data entry on updating contact information, but also be able to update volunteer availability, chapter affiliation, Newsletter subscriptions, taskforces, issues interest….
*sigh*
April 4th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
We’ve had that same throught here. I think someone could build that app and charge people for it. I know we’d pay a small monthly fee for something like that.
April 8th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
Just an FYI, if you go to use DIA (www.democracyinaction.org), they are just now implementing a user profile technique that will allow a lot of these options that the stay-in-touch option doesnt work. I am hesitent to use it just yet till i figure out how to integrate it with salesforce. API processes scare the hell out of me, and while it’s capabilities are rumored to be great, the DIA API documentation is practically nil.
If I could integrate the two, it would be amazing. Just an FYI, for up to 3000 email subscribers, you only pay 1-200 a month for the DIA tools. Some things that internet users will be able to update in their profile will be newletters, availability, affiliation, taskforces, issues interest, etc.
I am really excited about it as I have been dabbling with it. But I am constantly whining about how I cant get those user-made updates automatically updated into salesforce unless I export profiles from DIA, convert in ACCESS, and import into Salesforce. Ick.
-Suzannah
ps - if you do go to DIA, please mention NOW-New Jersey as a referrer. Definitely check out their impressive contact list which includes CodePink and the ACLU.
April 9th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
We love Chris and his crew over at DIA. They’re doing great things, and we use their functionality with a lot of our clients. We too are thinking about integration with Salesforce.com and what that looks like. I export my DIA supporters to CVS, then bring them in to Salesforce.com as leads, and convert them with a lead conversion interface I’m going to appexchange soon. This works pretty well for getting new subscribers into sf.com. Handling updates of changed profiles would be a bit tougher, but not too hard.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Hi Steve,
First, great conversation with Suzannah — though I know it’s about a year old, these dialogues are so educational!
A few questions:
-Did you ever get that DIA integration going?
-Have you figured out a way to customize the “stay-in-touch” fields?
-Have you (or Suzannah, if you’re reading) figured out a way to deal with having different constituent/organization hierarchies?
Some of our constituents (members, volunteers, researchers) we care about most as individuals but some are just staffpeople for organizations with whom we have no other relationship. I had created a system where everyone had an account, but my extremely un-tech-savvy staff have a really hard time remembering all the steps and entering the data for one individual in under 10 minutes.
Also, the reality is, most of those people will never become individual members — our interest in them is mainly as a B-to-B contact (staff at unions we want to join). HOWEVER, we then have a handful (150 or so) contacts who are BOTH key individual members and “influencers” or “decision-makers” on memberships/sponsorships from their organizations, important supervisors of departments, key contacts on org.-related activism, etc.
How do you manage individuals who are important as B-to-B contacts and individual friends of the organization? Basically, how do we deal with powerhouse individuals?
…And then the flip to that, how do we deal when some of those supposed office-worker-only contacts become involved with our organization?
-Finally, do you have any tips on how to designate a person’s relationship with our organization distinct from their relationship with their employer? We were using contact roles to show the relationships with the employer and using partnerships for relationships with us (either our partner orgs or individuals), but the contact role object is only visible on the organization, not the individual contact. As in, when I look at the contact record, I can’t see that person’s contact roles. When I look at the org. where they work, I can see them listed as a contact role. It’s causing problems, as I’m sure you can imagine.
Any feedback will be greatly appreciated!
-Khadijah from MassCOSH.