Dealing with Individuals

[tsf]

Doesn't that also violate the good design principle of normalization?  You'd be left with two fields in Donation records that represent the entity that gave the donation.  Even worse, I believe without some additional safeguards built in, a user would be able to select a contact and an account/organization for the same donation.  And this is true even if you use Contact Roles instead of a lookup for contacts, perhaps even worse.

From a database perspective, it's easy to see that there would have to be separate fields for contact and account/organization lookups, since they're different tables (objects).  But from an end-user perspective and a real-world perspective, there should not be a difference, there should be one field that relates a donation to who gave it.  To me, that would be a huge advantage to using the person accounts, all potential donors (individuals and organizations) are stored in the accounts object, making the two different lookups in the Donation object unnecessary.

[Brendan]

Hi all,

To prod this conversation on one more time, the main things we would like to see happen related to individuals, is to be able to 1. run reports on how much individual giving has happened in a given time period, and to 2. be able to send out individual solicitations (separate from organizational solicitations).

The idea I have here may not be original, but I didn't see anything obviously said about it in this thread; however, I am far from great with S-force, so I could easily be missing some big issues with my thoughts here, and would appreciate anyone who brings me back to earth if that's the case.

But, here's what I'm wondering about--

Related to the first issue I mention above, I am thinking about listing all our individuals who are not associated with an organization that we know of, under the traditional "individual" account, and all who are associated with an org., under that orginization's account.

Then, as my reasoning goes, everyone who is a "contact" for ANY account ("individual" or otherwise) and gave, constitutes my list of individual donors (all non-individual donations would be listed on the "account" pages for orgs., and not on any of the "contact" pages). Then, it seems we would just have to be able to either develop one or two reports, depending on what's possible, to deal with that first objective, of being able to know how much we have received in individual donations.

With the second issue of sending some solicitations that go only to individuals, I am thinking I might just try to have a place for a secondary/home address to be listed, and that anytime that address is filled in, that individual will be included in individual solicitations. If I could get Conga or the S-force mail merge, whichever we decide to definitely use, to recognize that the second address was entered, and pull those names and addresses when we do individual solicitations, I think it could work.

Does this logic run into some real issues that anyone recognizes? I would gratefully appreciate any feedback.

Many thanks,

Brendan

[sf_liz]

Hi all - I am new to setting up Salesforce for nonprofits, but have performed many for-profit business implementations. I'm trying to find the latest stance on using Person Accounts with/instead of the existing Nonprofit template. Can any of the veterans discuss this?

I've read the B2C implementation guide, and it seems to be well-thought out, given the constraints of today's system.

- Other than the effort to re-customize existing solutions within the NP template, is there any other key area that depends on today's template acting as it is?
- Can someone easily layout the 2-3 big NGO issues that are not 100% resolved by Person Accounts?
- If Person Accounts doesn't 100% resolve these NGO issues, does it resolve some? Does that make the holy grail of one surefire NGO template even more elusive?

I'm guessing the need for some NGOs to track a person as an individual donor and as an employee of a company that donates is still key.

Today a Person Account can't have a Contact related list, but you could use the Partner Role to determine associated "household' members. This means you still have 2 Accounts with the same mailing address, which the Household object is meant to resolve.

However having a Lead and being able to convert that to either a Business or Person Account seems powerful - could that possibly replace the "Contact" & "New Contact" customization?

I have a lot of ramping up to do about how things work in the NGO world, so if there are some glaring oversights, that's why. I'm all ears!

[kingisgone]

Hi,

I just signed up for SF.com for our non-profit and haven't taken it for a spin yet.  I do have experience using CRM systems in a for-profit context as a developer and project manager.

Here are some of my thoughts....

CRM systems are designed around the idea that accounts are the buyers and the contacts are people who work there.  The contacts can be decision makers, users of your product, etc.

My own observations of our own organization is that most of our donors are individuals.  Even in those cases where companies give, its usually because of some sort of individual connection.  Its either a corporate matching program or we have a relationship with the proprietor of the business or something like that.  Occasionally, we also do get cases where the business (moreso than the individual associated with it) is the donor.

As such, my suggestion would be doing contact as the individual and creating an account record for them.  When you have two people living in the same home, then you can have one account record with multiple contact records depending on your individual dynamic.  If not, you can use the household object.

[roco]

Ok........So there does not appear to be a solution here?

Here is an idea...Is there a way to block out the "New" button from the Donation home page so that a user would have to go to the contact or organization to record a donation?  This way it appears that the Role is automatically populated and Salesforce is happy. 

I tried the Lookup to Contact Name but with this approach, the role is still not linked to the donation unless you do so later.

I don't understand the role technique - maybe because it so clewgy. 


So that is my 2 cents........  Does anyone know how to erase that new button from the donations home page?

Thanks,
roco

[Kevin K]

We've chosen the first option and it works just fine. We put "Individual" in under Organization/Account.

[roco]

With that approach - If you select the new button from within donations, your donation will not be linked to a contact unless you go to another step in selecting the role of the donation which is not selectable from the donation creatino page.  This seems to be the issue for our users.  If there was no "New" button here than our users would have to go to the contact to create the donation from and then the donation would be automatically linked. So...........how do we get rid of the "New" button from the Donation home page?  - roco

[Colin Loretz]

I've been working on a fairly complex implementation for tracking donations and just found this thread.

I have been exploring Person Accounts and using record types. Once Person Accounts are activated, I assume you could add the record type field  to the layout and choose between Person Account (B2C) or Business Account (B2B). Has anyone tried this? I might give it a go in my developer edition later today.

With this, the Person Account supports individuals, friends, and family who are donors and the Business Accounts will hold any organizations or companies who contribute.

[TLF]

I missed yesterday's NPSF meeting, but I heard there was some discussion of a new feature in the new non-profit template that allows you to enable a 1 to 1 relationship between a Contact and an Account to help handle individuals. Can anyone provide a little more detail and compare it against the use of the "Individual" Account and/or Person Accounts? Thanks.

[dmcheng]

One thing I can say - if your organization's priority is tracking limited-duration and renewable memberships, then you need to create an Individual record type for Account and use an Account record for every individual.  Because opportunities are directly linked to accounts, this is the only way to track membership payments over a span of years and determine the current membership expiration date and status (Active or Lapsed).