My Householding app on Appexchange
Last Updated on Thursday, 27 April 2006 08:22 Written by Steve Thursday, 27 April 2006 08:19
My app for Householding joins my Rapid Lead Converter and Online Donation Importer and my Functional Documentation Embedded in Salesforce.com as publicly available on Appexchange. While Housedholing is a continual work in progress, it’s exciting to make it publicly available to people who might find it valuable.
What is Householding?
- It is the grouping of multiple people together based on a shared physical address
- It facilitates direct mail, allowing you to send one piece of mail per physical address, even if the family has multiple Contacts in your database
What does my Appexchange setup do?
- Gives you the Household custom object
- Gives you a form that creates up to two Contacts, a Household, and relates them together all at once
- Gives you some helpful ways to keep Contact and Household addresses in sync
If you want to implement Householding, it’s actually fairly complex. It’s a way of thinking about your Contacts, how they relate to each other, how you track Opportunities, and what all your reports look like. Getting this app set up is fairly straightforward, but doing Householding, as anyone who has done it will tell you, is kind of a pain. But if you need to do it, you need to do it!
As always, I love feedback! Take a look. Check out the test drive!
Steve,
I work for a non-profit organization in Colorado that offers ski and snowboard programs to 1,800 kids. We’re looking for a means to relate parents and kids so we can consolidate our database. For instance we want to be able to tag contacts as family members so we can automatically do a direct mail campaign to all parents of our participants automatically.
Will your Householding app do this? Is there room for more than two contacts per household? Can you app handle two participants who are siblings and whose parents are divorced?
This would be an absolute godsend.
We’re exploring using salesforce.com and want to see if we can cobble together the necessary apps to handle the registration process of our participants and the fundraising needs we have.
Any feedback is most welcome either on this blog or at the email enclosed.
Thanks for your work on this!
Steve: I think I have your householding implimented – it came standard with the non-profit version 3 weeks ago. The problem I am having is that I can’t use any of the household fields in mail merge or campaign functions. The programs only find account and contact data .. so if I use the household reference name in an address, it fills in blank in both standard mail merge and extended mail merge. Do you have a solution?
Thanks.