I don't mean to keep rehashing the same old questions, but I'm just getting started with SF for a non-profit and this thread has some really good information dealing with an issue that I believe is central to adopting SF for a non-profit, which is still (in my mind at least) not quite settled. From my perspective a NP has three types of constituents they need to track:
1. Organizations they have a relationship with, e.g. foundations, companies, other non-profits, etc.
2. Individuals associated with those organizations (most likely as employees or other contacts). This could be further sub-divided into individuals who are important soley because of their association with said organization and those who are also associated with the NP by their own accord (e.g. they're your contact at a foundation who gives to you, but they also donate as an individual) - then again all individuals are potential donors so that distinction might not be necessary.
3. Individuals who are not associated with an organization. You might want to know they work for XYZ Company as part of their record, but you have no relationship with XYZ Company that you need to track independently.
The SF non-profit template works well for groups 1 and 2, since they're more or less in line with how a normal company would use a CRM. Group 3 doesn't fit as nicely, so they get around that by assigning them as contacts to a "dummy" organization just for those types of individuals. This is a bit of a hack, but it might work fine for keeping track of constituents and their general biographical information. I find it less appealing when you get in to things like linking them to donations. I think each donation record (whether it's the renamed opportunity or a custom object, that could be a whole new discussion) should have one field that links it to its donor, whether it is an organization or an individual. The different objects used to store individuals vs organizations makes this difficult, and I find the solution to use Contact Roles quite unwieldy.
At first glance, the contact/account hybrid called a person account would seem to be the ideal solution, so I'm curious as to why SF discourages this practice as communicated in Gary on Seaward's post in this thread. Here's part of the definition from SF help:
"A person account is an individual consumer with whom you do business, such as a financial services client, an online shopper, or a vacation traveler. Person accounts are applicable to organizations that operate on a business-to-consumer model as opposed to a business-to-business model."
To me that describes my needs, since if you were to make the business analogy, most non-profits operate both on a business-to-consumer and a business-to-business model, i.e. we receive donations from both individuals and organizations. This could potentially solve the gift-linkage problem as the account object would once again be the main object for tracking constituents, and gifts could be attributed to a person account (when given by an individual) or a business account (when given by an organization). The contact object might not even be needed, as the person account would store the individual-specific information usually found in a contact record. The Accounts object might be renamed to something more general like "Donors" to reflect this. Also, if I understand it correctly, you'd be able to use the Spring 07 Enhanced Data Model Customizations to still link individuals (person accounts) to their related organizations (business accounts) ["Recursive Relationships on Standard Objects: Create “self”-lookup relationships to model a relationship between two records of the same object type (for example, an opportunity and its related opportunities)"].
Sorry for my long-windedness - give yourself a pat on the back if you made it this far, and an even bigger pat if you have all the answers I seek :-)
