Salesforce was designed to work best with business-to-business relationships, not business-to-individual relationships which are more common in the nonprofit sector. For example, all contacts must belong to an account, usually that of their employer. Opportunities (such as donations) must also belong to an account, not directly to a contact. Moreover, no standard object allows you to model important relationships between contacts, such as those who live in a single household.
To work around these limitations, NPower has customized Salesforce in the following ways:
- Added a custom Household object that contains all contacts that live at a single address.
- Created a special account, called Individual, which contains any contacts whose employer isn’t an account in your database.
- Provided Opportunity Contact Roles that you can use to connect donations to the donors that make them.
- Created custom buttons, tabs, reports, and program code that help you enter and maintain data consistently in this custom data structure.
To get the most from your Salesforce database, it is important to understand the relationship between these primary objects: Contacts, Households, Accounts, and Opportunities. The following diagram shows how a few sample records might be associated in your database:
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