My Householding App is now on Appexchange

[steve_andersen]

My method for handling Households in Salesforce.com is live on Appexchange. There are many ways to do Householding. Mine is one way that may or may not make sense for you.

I did more of a write up of it on my blog.

I'd love feedback!

Steve

[alc_rachel]

Hi Steve,

Meghan sent me your way to ask about householding. Please bear with me, I am fairly new to Salesforce and just completed my weeklong initial training workshop. I work for a small environmental non-profit and we are looking to customize the app fairly extensively (as are most nonprofits I'm sure). I'm trying to understand why it might be better to use a Householding tab / custom object rather than creating a few Account Record types (for households, organzations, etc.) to delineate Individuals vs. Organizations. Meghan mentioned it made mailing lists easier, and on the AppExchange you mention that it makes it easier to add multiple contacts to one household. But the first thing I thought of intuitively was the account address being the household address on a "household" record type in accounts, and then the two contacts would just relate to the account as it does pretty much out of the box -- why does doing that become problematic?

Thanks so much for your help,
Rachel

[gokubi]

Hi Rachel--I love environmental nonprofits who are using Salesforce!

I wrote up some thoughts about the problem that might be interesting to you.

The short story is that since you can relate a Contact to only one Account, if you use that to represent the Household relationship, you can't use the Account for tracking where someone works. You may not have that need, and I know a lot of nonprofits are using sf.com exactly how you are proposing. I found the need for using the Account to track employment, so I created the Household object.

Hope that helps,

Steve

[John Licata]

I added a "linking object" to connect people (CONTACTS) to their employer (ACCOUNTS) where the "primary relationship" with the person is as an individual and not part of a company.  I name the object "Constituent Employment" with these fields: Employer (look up on ACCOUNTS), Employee (look up on CONTACTS), Position (TEXT), Start Date (DATE) and End Date (DATE).

This creates a "Constituent Employment" section on both the Account and Contact screens.  Since this is a many-to-many relationship you can track the history on a contacts employment with the start and end dates.

If the "primary relationship" with the person is through the Company, we just list them as attached contacts.

Hope this doesn't confuse the issue any more that it is.

John Licata

SingularFX

[gokubi]

That's one way to get around the fact that a Contact can only be related to one Account. Since sf.com is built with the Contact-to-Account relationship representing employment, I like using it for that. My philosophy is to stay as close to "vanilla" as possible, becuase the platform keeps getting better and I want to be able to take advantage of those improvments.

I do understand that there is benefit to using the Account as a Household. It sure simplifies the Opportunity stuff!

One drawback with the way you're talking about it is that you have to look for employees in more than one place--in the Contacts related list for an Account, and also in the related list for your linking object.

What I've found is that there is no right way to handle the complexity here, and that all methods have trade-offs. My method sure has drawbacks. Is it better than other methods? I think it's best to say that in some situations it is better, and in others it isn't. One of my goals is that nonprofits go into their configuration decision understanding what the trade offs are, so they can make the best choice for their situation.

Steve

[John Licata]

I'm 100% with you!

Have you heard any gossip on a B2C or nonprofit "version" of SFDC being on the horizion?

Thanks,

John

[gokubi]

B2I (business to individual) is definitely on the horizon. There will likely be some sort of functionality added in the next release, whenever that is. Will it solve all our problems in the next year? Probably not. But long term I can only see the B2I support getting better. Think about Lands End, or larege call centers. Right now they can't use Salesforce.com because it lacks this support. That's a market that I don't think Salesforce will stay away from for too much longer.

Steve

[alc_rachel]

Thanks! This is all really helpful. Since I haven't done any intensive example testing I haven't figured out all the pros and cons of these different organizational structures, so I agree, that would be the best place to start. I may indeed end up going with your model! Sounds like I just need to sit back and get more comfortable with our needs vs. Salesforce abilities before I make a decision.

[Gideon]

I exchanged emails with Steve Andersen at ONE on this topic Household accounts and enjoyed our exchange. I also admire his work on his Householding App.

Similarly, I have been in contact with other database professionals in Salesforce and out. Their feedback is that the nonprofit model is a very important model because we interact with people based on their many roles - students or parents of students represent household accounts for family interests, staff represent employer or employers for job security, and board members represent organization policies. Salesforce was designed with a limited view of the role or duty of a contact - act in the best interests of the single account they represent and assume all interactions with that contact are for that account.

They have all told me that you WANT to have multiple contacts for the SAME person, because it is the ROLE at the ACCOUNT what you are interacting with. You can't treat a father's role the same as an employee's role.

After much valuable feedback from all sides, I've decided I'll be making multiple contacts for the same person in multiple roles. I'll use a custom object to show if a contact has other roles (as a different contact) with other accounts, and I will provide links to those other roles and accounts.

Is anyone else doing this?

Gideon Jesionowski

[cesaralopez]

Gideon, this sounds like a viable solution but how is it done? I'm very new to the administration side of SF and think that with an example of the fields you created, I'd be able to implement this and make it work for my organization.

Thanks!