Dealing with Individuals

[ChristineS]

I have the same questions around this issue. Has anyone explored creating a household or individual contact like you would an organization? For example, with this approach the individual's name or household's name would be the "organization." I realize that when distinguishing between organization donations/grants and individual donations, this might be a problem - unless there is field name that could be used for filtering. I am trying to figure out the best route for this now.

I am also wondering if the new (forthcoming?) nonprofit template might make it easier to track individuals and their giving histories, households, etc?

Thanks,
Christine

[BryBreck]

Hello!  This is a great question.  One that we've worked hard to help our clients work out.  Please see the two links below.

1.  Search the Nonprofit Salesforce.com Practitioners Google Group for some very colorful discussions on this.  People have approached this in several ways over the years.

http://groups.google.com/group/npsf

2.  Salesforce.com Foundation's Nonprofit Starter Packs were designed with this issue in mind.  Learn more about them here: http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/nonprofitstarterpack

[fairclok87]

to all,

Individuals at my organization can touch the organization in many ways. They don't just have to be a volunteer. they could also be a teaching artist and or student and or visitor to a specific show (ie, musical). What is the best way about identifying an individual in different ways? Currently, I'm planning on setting up a one-to-one model, but that only allows me to identify them by themselves or a category of my choosing. For example, if I label someone as a "volunteer" in the organization field, how do I show that they are a teaching artist as well?

In the end, I would like to show all of our major events (12 of them) and how people were connected to them.    Were they volunteers for one event?    were they actors and volunteers for another event.    

1.)  this way when I click on the event it shows all my contacts who were involved and in what aspect

2.)  when i click on the contact it shows me all the events they particpated in an in what capacityl.

This way i can report on them.

thoughts?

[SteveSpiker]

We just ran into this issue today, not a big deal for us as most funds are from grants so I couldn't justify too much time on it. Found a good solution on a google group after trying some more elaborate ideas here.. We use the new NP starter pack and the Household record does not allow us to list donations against entries, frustrating. So, I added a new Relationship Lookup field to the Donations page, linked to Contacts, our users have to specify the "One-to-One Individual" in the Organization field and then use the lookup to find their donator as a contact record. Works fairly well and does allow for decent reporting still.

This creates a new related list in the Contact record that shows all individual donations, I like it.

http://www.screencast.com/t/ZjkxNTg3

We make quick dirty vids with Jing for each new process we setup, take a look, may help some folks.

Spike

[Bekah]

My organization is new to salesforce and we're currently using the non-profit starter pack.  My question is, I HATE that every individual (that is not tied to an organization already created) automatically creates their own organization under their name.  This happens through the uneditable 'account processor' function.  I hate this because we function with out 18,000 subscribers that cannot be attributed to an org (little old people who like our newsletter) but then have hundreds of actual organizations (large members and sponsors) that need to be dealt with completely separately.  So, I hate it when I open my 'organization' tab and see all the individuals there with my actual organizations.

My question is, how have other non-profits dealt with this attribute?  I have 'canoodled' several ideas to combat this:  creating a fake organization to attribute all the 18,000 subscribers to, create a new object for our organizations that are actually organizations, etc...

Any help would be so greatly appreciated

Thanks!

[dani1213]

Bekah, I have the exact same problem!  My client is a NP and they do not like that a new individual is automatically linked to an organization of the same name.  I was wondering if you ever solved the problem / if other people have any insight on this?

[Bekah]

Nope.  The best I could come up with is to create a ficitious organization (ie:  'General') and put our individuals under there (haven't inputted all 18,000 yet and I'm wondering if this will even work).  From what I could read from other boards is this function is non-turn-offable...it's silly and definitely impedes some of our Salesforce functionality.