Integrating donor systems and bank accounts? Please help.

[amywilley]

I am very new to Salesforce and to my organization.  I am trying to integrate all of our donor lists and bank accounts so that all donations will show up in salesforce.  Is this possible?  How do I do this? 

Thanks!

[Garry_Polmateer]

Can you be more specific about what your goal is and what you mean by "integrating bank accounts with donors"?  Do you mean linking their personal bank accounts with their donor records, or linking their donations back into your accounting software?  We need some more information to go on before we can ascertain what's available.

Thanks!

Garry

[amywilley]

Thank you for your reply.  What we are attempting to do is to use salesforce as our administrative headquarters.  We use many donation management systems:  Network for Good, Just Give, Google Matching, Microsoft Matching, Employee Community Fund Boeing, Fannie Mae SERVE, America's Charities, Paypal, etc.  and we want to find a way so that when a donation is made we will have central location that will be updated.  We want to link the nonprofit bank account to the donor records and also link the donations to an accounting database.  I would like to have a place where I can open up and see exactly who has donated recently (name, amount, etc) and then be able to use that information for many purposes (for example, to write them a receipt, to track donations for a matching grant, or simply to improve transparency).  Does this seem like something that is available? 

Thanks!

Amy

[Garry_Polmateer]

That's a lot of stuff!  In my experience, this is not something that is an "out of the box" addon for Salesforce.  There have been some integrations build already, but not all, and not any that have been productized and tested from what I could tell from some quick searching. 

With that said, Salesforce is available to integrate with 3rd party services, but each one of the services you mentioned may have a different way to create the integration and will need some custom work to build, test, and secure each integration.

Plan B, if you get reports from each of the services, perhaps you could write imports using DemandTools or the DateLoader to import the information easily and regularly into Salesforce.  Not realtime, but may help build out a member history.

Overall though there may be many challenges.  I.E.  If yo uhave a record in Salesforce named John Smith, and John Smith donates to Project for Good, how does Salesforce know that that is the same John Smith?  There are many moving parts.  

I'm not trying to turn you off to the idea, but it may be a large endeavor... or not.  I've seen a lot of creative people solve problems like this.

I hope this helps...I wish I could just say "Yes"

Garry