Dealing with Individuals

[TimJ]

Hi all,

I'm wonder what the current wisdom is in handling individual donors: are you attaching them to an "Individuals" Account?  If each individual (Contact) is associated with their own Account, what are you entering for Company or Organization? 

Have some created custom objects and foregone Accounts and Contacts completely?

Many thanks,

Tim

[gokubi]

I don't know what the conventional wisdom is, but the default template that all nonprofits get when subscribing to Salesforce.com now goes the route of the "Individual" account. I've written a number of things about the opportunities and challenges of going that route at http://gokubi.com.

Here are a couple articles about Contact-centric databases that you might find interesting:

Handling People, Organizations and Households in Salesforce

Opportunities in a Contact-centric Salesforce database

Households and Campaigns in a Contact-centric Salesforce.com

Steve

[RemH]

Hi Tim,

As to your question of forsaking accounts and contacts entirely, we certainly recommend against that.  There's an awful lot of 'out of the box' functionality that comes with the salesforce CRM system that you'd be losing if you created your own custom objects for contacts.  MS Outlook integration for one.   Integrations to email marketing partners for another.  I'd avoid that route if at all possible!

Cheers,
Rem

[JudiS]

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TimJ wrote:

Hi all,

I'm wonder what the current wisdom is in handling individual donors: are you attaching them to an "Individuals" Account?  If each individual (Contact) is associated with their own Account, what are you entering for Company or Organization? 

Have some created custom objects and foregone Accounts and Contacts completely?

Many thanks,

Tim

---

We're a couple of months or so into our implementation, so I'm not sure if this is the "right" answer but it's working for us... We put individual donors into an "Individual" account. Households are in their own account. So John Smith by himself is in "Individual" but if we have John Smith and his wife Mary in our database living at the same address, they're both in the "John Smith and Mary Smith" account with a record type of "Household."

We are using the new nonprofit template and tried working with the new household custom object, but we needed to be able to attach donations to households as if they were organizations/accounts and this appeared to be the best way to make that happen (by making them organizations).

Wherever possible we've tried (with the help of our wonderful consultant Meghan) to use Salesforce "out of the box"...makes it easier to work with 3rd party tools from the app exchange or the Outlook plug-in.

[nonprofitmonkey]

Wow. that question took me over a month to figure out myself.

we opted to stay with the accounts contacts model that comes out of the box.  I have a membership based organization - and a women's rights one at that - so most women want to get their own mail and not a 'householded' mailing.    They dont really like Mr. & Mrs. Smith - they want Ms Smith and Mr. Smith to get their own mail.

But honestly, whats been great is they way its forced the nonprofit mindset to look at our world more business-y.  All membership and financial details are handled in the account, all personal contact and volunteer information handled in the contact.    Plus all the reporting functions are easier with the out-of-the-box assumption that an account and a contact will need to have both sets of info in the report.

With householding, as a former campaign manager, I would suggest something else.  You usually only use householding for mail, right?  well. I would suggest maybe a few options:

1. there is a partner role function that can connect two accounts
2. use gokubi's new 'connector' that connects contacts
3. I have three kinds of membership types:  Organization, Individual, and Family.  I create a custom field that is "Mailing Name" to go alongside the "Mailing Address" details in the account.  For Jane Doe, it says "Jane Doe" and the record type is "individual" .  For Mr. James Doe and Ms. Ethel Doe the record type is family, there are two contacts to the record (James & Ethel) and the "mailing Name" is a custom field that says "Mr. James Doe and Ms. Ethel Doe".  This is the field I use in mailings & emails.

[jessforce]

Tim,

This is a great question and one that I've come across myself.

In my opinion, you can do one of two things:

a. For individuals who are important to you because of the company or organization they work for, then I would put them under a company account. For example:

ACCOUNT = Salesforce Foundation
CONTACT NAME = Meghan Nesbitt

b. For individuals who are important to you as individuals, therefore they are under an individual account but you want to keep track of the company they work for either for your own knowledge or for mailing purposes (especially if you're mailing something to that person at their place of work and you want the company name to appear on the mailing label), I would create a new field called "Company Name". (This field might already exist, you either just need to change your security settings or your page layout settings to make it visible). For example:

ACCOUNT = Jane Smith (or "Smith, Jane" -OR- "Jane Smith Household"--really whatever your naming convention currently is)
CONTACT NAME = Jane Smith
COMPANY NAME = Microsoft

I hope this answers your question.

Jessica

[TimJ]

Thanks to all for the good discussion.  It reveals some of the contact complexity particular to fundraising and explains why some organizations will still invest in Raiser's Edge though I generally find that proposition difficult to justify, not merely on cost, but on TCO and value.

Tim

[Eoin]

We're very new to Salesforce, I'm just setting it up for our charity at the moment.  I heard at our training session that the next version will have a new object, some kind of hybrid Contact/Account that can own an Opportunity.

If that's accurate, we plan to use that object to refer to individuals, and link them to Organisations as appropriate.

Would anyone here know if that new object in the for-profit version will be quickly implemented in our version? I could delay our implementation until that's in place if it will be happenning soon.

thanks

[Hell's Kitchen]

Yes, as a non-profit, you are running Enterprise Edition and thus should be able to take advantage of Winter '07 updates, including the Account-Contact hybrid; i think Salesforce calls this individual-type account a "Client."

You don't need to wait to implement, though. Just set up each contact with a unique account record.  This is what I've done to set myself up so that the transition to the Winter '07 "Client" record should be a breeze:

Create a Page Layout called Individuals, and to keep it simple, pull almost everything off of the layout, so that all contact information (address, phone, email) will be tracked on the Contact only. I recommend putting the "Contact Record Type" field is on all layouts.

Create two Account record types: Businesses and Individuals and assign the Individuals page layout to the Individuals Account.

Now it's time for import.  Here's what I did:

In Excel, I took a spreadsheet of my contacts and added a column called "Account Name."  In this column, I pasted a function that concatenated the first name, a space, the last name, a space, and then the word "Account."  So each record had an account name like, "John Doe Account" and "Mary Smith Account." I then copied the entire column and pasted-special in the same place as "values only"

Be Careful with duplicates, though.... if you have two Mary Smiths in your database (two different people with the same name), Salesforce may try to de-dupe them erroneously or match both Mary Smiths to the same account.  If you think this might be a problem for you, either add something like a zip code to the account name concatenation or import dupes in a separate batch with de-duping turned off.

When importing records, Salesforce looks at the importing user's default record type and automatically assigns all records to that record type. So before you import, make sure that your profile has the Individual account record type selected as the default! 

I should note that I did import a handful of Business accounts with contacts as business employees.  I imported them separately from our Individual accounts. The business names were the "account name" column, I mapped the address to both the contact and account, and I made sure that I switched my default account record type back to "Business Account" so the record types were correct on import.

I hope this helps!

Message Edited by Hell's Kitchen on 12-03-200608:56 PM

[Gary on Seaward]

I am just in the planning stage of a salesforce implementation, and thus still a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities for representing people, households and organizations.  The posts by gokubi (Steve) and Hells Kitchen are wonderfully helpful.

On a webinar I asked Meghan Nesbit about the use of the new Person Accounts by non-profits.  She responded that if all you have is individuals, then it's worth considering.  But if, like most non-profits, you have "hybrid" relationships, mostly people but some organizations, then there will be a great deal of inconsistency in the use of Salesforce with  Person Accounts, and also some anomalies with support facilities such as reports.  (I hope I'm accurately quoting the spirit of her reply!)  I infer that Salesforce is permitting the use of Person Accounts with some reluctance, and that they expect to have the facility working more smoothly with the Spring '07 release.

So OK, we'll put Person Accounts aside.  But can anyone explain why use Households at all?  If both Households and Organizations serve to aggregate Contacts, and if Organizations (aka Accounts) are the necessary basic table in Salesforce, then doesn't it make sense to let the Organization represent the physical household, which may have one, two or more individuals' names?

Many thanks.

Message Edited by Gary on Seaward on 02-07-200708:05 AM