Category: Contact Management

DISH:  NPSP has an affiliation status field, but it demands that you update it along with the end date. Assuming you do not have an interim status like “On Extended Leave”  you may as well automate that field with a workflow.

WHY THIS MATTERS:  It is unnecessary to force users to enter 2 fields when they only need to enter one.  Data quality will suffer if we see that users have an end date but are also current affiliations.

SOLUTION:  When the end date is entered a workflow will update the status field as “Former” and uncheck the primary indicator, if the end date is erased the status field will return the status field to “Current.”

INGREDIENTS:

• Know exactly how you plan to use affiliations in your org
  

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TOOLS REQUIRED: 

• Process Builder
  

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STEPS:

1. 1. Create a new process. (Setup|Create|Workflow & Approvals|Process Builder)
      • Select New
      • Give your process a name and description (Start with the object name so you know which processes control which objects)
      • Enter A record changes under “The process starts when*”
      • Enter Affiliation in the Object Field
      • Start the process “When a record is created or edited.”
      • Select Save
      • Select Add Criteria
      • Enter a Criteria Name “End Date is entered.”
      • Criteria for Executing Actions = Conditions are met
      • Condition 1 End Date Is Null Boolean False
      • You want to execute only when specified changes are made
      • Select Save
      • Select Immediate Actions|Add Action next to your first decision diamond
      • 
      • Select update records
      • Action Name = Status Former
      • Select update type Select the npe5_Affiliation__c record that started your process
      • Select Choose
      • Select no criteria just update the records
      • Select Status Picklist Former
      • Select Primary Boolean False
      • Select Save
      • Select Add Criteria in the next diamond
      • Enter a Criteria Name “End Date is erased”
      • Criteria for Executing Actions = Conditions are met
      • Condition 1 End Date Is Null Boolean True
      • You want to execute only when specified changes are made
      • Select Save
      • Select Immediate Actions|Add Action next to your second decision diamond
      • Select update records
      • Action Name = Status Current
      • Select update type Select the npe5_Affiliation__c record that started your process
      • Select Choose
      • Select no criteria just update the records
      • Select Status Picklist Current
      • Select Save (NOTE: You probably do not want to check primary here as it could be possible to have two affiliations with no end date)
      • Select Activate
      • 
      • Select Confirm

SERVE: Test your solution and update your user training guides.

Enter an affiliation End Date and save.

The Status will change to Former and Primary will be unchecked.

Erase the affiliation End Date and save.  

The Status will change to current, primary is checked manually. Please be sure to indicate this in the training materials.

RISK LEVEL: Low

TIME: 10 minutes

RELATED POSTS:

Cookbook – Strengthen NPSP affiliations management

Part 1 Decide what affiliations are for

Part 3 Align Title fields between Affiliations and Contacts

You want to be careful with using affiliations to record everything that relates a contact and an organization.  While having structured relational data has powerful potential, it can create complexity you don’t need.  In some cases, relationships would be better handled by a field update or even a note.

Examples where affiliations may be overdoing it:

• You only participate in grassroots fundraising and the employers of your funders is unimportant or too much data to be worth managing
• Your program is not centered around individuals, where they work or a need to leverage those extra accounts
• There are a very limited number of possibilities  for account relationships
  • A picklist of 4 possible unions is quicker and easier to manage
• You only care about the level of degree achieved not the actual volume of graduates from a particular school
• Managing account data, especially duplicate accounts is too risky at this time
• You want to be very careful about how much data storage you are using, you may already use the org to contact model rather than the household model for this reason

Assuming you’ve thought about all that and you feel it’s important to record at least some of the information using affiliations, decide on a design for customizing the affiliation record.  Salesforce and NPSP offer a lot of power and customization, but always make sure your focused on what’s critical to your outcomes vs what looks like a cool design or covers every odd scenario.

It’s always best to diagram your model out and share it with your business teams.  Be sure you and each business team are challenging each other to capture critical information in a structured (report-able) way while balancing the capacity for data entry and system training.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Type: If you’re categorizing affiliations broadly, employment, education, volunteering, decide if a type field would suffice or a record type.
   • Type – a required field that simply splits out the object into broad categories.
   • Record Type – a required field that forces you to manage a whole new set of permissions, page layouts. It also changes the available picklist values.  It’s strongly recommended you start with a simple type and move to a record type only when you absolutely need it. Read more Record Type Steps
2. Role – NPSP comes with this text field.  Decide if this text field is useful at all, it’s quite up to you how to use it.
3. Title: If you plan on recording a job title, you can use the Role field, but be mindful you should hide the Title field on the contact or use a solution to populate or calculate (LINK) it.
4. Other custom affiliation fields that could be useful.
   • If you’re training people on the job, you may want to relate your training (custom solution) to the job (affiliation)
   • The manager, program director or some other contact that influences this affiliation
   • A reason the affiliation ended
5. Examples of validations to ensure important data is entered
   • Type and starting grade level are required when linking to school accounts only
   • Job role/title and job level is required when entering employment type affiliations
   • A start date is required for programmatic affiliations
   • The start date should never come after the end date

RELATED POSTS:
Cookbook – Strengthen NPSP affiliations management

Part 2 Automate the Status field

Part 3 Align Title fields between Affiliations and Contacts

DISH:  NPSP has the Role field on the affiliation record, Salesforce has the standard Title field on the contact record.  To ensure both values are aligned, you must manually enter and update duplicate information.

WHY THIS MATTERS:  Users are confused by having duplicate fields in different places and will lose faith in their data and the amount of effort it takes to maintain.

SOLUTION:  When the Role field is updated on a primary affiliation auto-populate the role value to the Title field on the related contact.

INGREDIENTS:

• Know exactly how you plan to use affiliations in your org
• Data currently stored in the Affiliation|Role fields and Contact|Title Fields. Export to csv files so you can move it to the correct field when the new model is complete
• Custom Title field on affiliation object
  

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TOOLS REQUIRED: 

• DLRS or Rollup Helper
  

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STEPS:

1. Create a Title field on the affiliation object.
   • Navigate to the role field in custom object setup (Setup|Create|Objects|Affiliation)
   • Select New
   • Select Text
   • Select Title as a field label and Name 128 as a field length (To match the contact field’s length) Enter a description and help text to your liking.
   • Make visible to all users and allow users to edit
   • Save to page layout and save  
   • Arrange in page layout by opening the layout editor and selecting edit
   • Drag and drop to remove role and replace with the new title field
   • 
   • Do the same for the related list from the contact page layout
   • Do the same for the related list from the account page layout
     

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2. Disable the NPSP Role field. (You can use the Role field as the Title but you cannot change the name of either so educating users on the difference may not be worth the effort.  I suggest you just disable the Role field for now. If it’s been used as a job title value you may want to move that data over to the new field.)
   • Navigate to the role field in custom object setup (Setup|Create|Objects|Affiliation
   • 
   • Select Set Field-Level Security
   • 
   • Deselect all user profiles and select save.
   • 
     

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3. Open DLRS by  selecting the plus sign and selecting Manage Lookup Rollup Summaries (Note you can do this with Rollup Helper but the field values and process will be slightly different)
   • You will be creating a new Rollup so you just need to input data into the available fields
   • Lookup Rollup Summary Name = Contact_Primary_Title
   • Lookup Rollup Summary Unique Name = Contact_Primary_Title
   • Parent Object= Contact
   • Child Object = npe5__Affiliation__c
   • Relationship Field = npe5__Contact__c
   • Relationship Criteria =npe5__Primary__c=True
   • Relationship Criteria Fields = npe5__Primary__c
   • Field to Aggregate = Title__c
   • Aggregate Operation = Concatenate Distinct
   • Aggregate Result Field = Title
   • Calculation Mode = Realtime
   • Calculation Sharing Mode = System
   • Active = False
   • Select Save
   • Select Manage Child Trigger
   • Select Deploy and wait until Deployment Complete message appears
   • Select Cancel
   • Select Active
   • Select Save
   • Select Calculate (Please note if you have more than 5000 or so affiliations you want to select Schedule Calculate
   • Select Run Calculate Job  Please NOTE:  Before you calculate the job you will want to move any values currently stored into the Title field on contacts into the new Title field on primary affiliations, calculating this job will remove all Contact Title values from any contacts that have a primary affiliation and replace it with the value on the affiliation even if that value is blank.
     

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4. Navigate to the contact field security Setup|Customize|Contacts|Fields|Title|SetFieldLevel Security
   • Set all to read only. This will ensure that users only add the title field by using the primary affiliation moving forward.

SERVE: Test your solution and update your user training guides.

Enter your title into an affiliation and be sure “Primary” is checked

Title automatically gets populated on the contact record

Consistent data when looking at org affiliations and contact titles.

RISK LEVEL: Low

TIME: 10 minutes (may take more time if contact title values need to be   migrated to primary affiliations)

RELATED POSTS:

Cookbook – Strengthen NPSP affiliations management

Part 1 Decide what affiliations are to be used for

Part 2 Automate the Status field

Challenge:  We started using NPSP affiliations without customization or clear purpose.

Affiliation is a great feature of the Non-Profit Success Pack. Many non-profits have people at the center of their work and being able to track current and historical relationships with organizations can be key.

Applications for Affiliation: 

• Employment and employment history of donors and external contacts (replaces the contact and account Salesforce model when the household model is used)
• Measure participants employment gains as related to your effort
• Maintain history of contact’s educational history and degrees
• Volunteer status between contacts and other organizations
• Board membership
  

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Overview:

Native Salesforce contains a feature called contact roles where multiple contacts are related to an account with the role that person plays.  In a business-to-business landscape, this is probably sufficient as the sales function only cares about who’s at the company and what their purpose is when making a sale. It’s not very customize-able, for example, you can’t indicate when they started or ended the role, designate if they’re a volunteer or board member etc.

Affiliations are an improvement over contact roles and come with a couple of cool features:

1. You can use the Primary Affiliation field on a contact to designate the main account related to the contact.
2. If you add or change the reference in the Primary Affiliation field on a contact, it auto-generates an affiliation record.
3. If you check the Primary checkbox on an affiliation record it will change the Primary Affiliation reference on the contact and uncheck all of the other affiliation’s Primary fields

This leaves us with some challenges:

1. Job titles can get mixed up especially if it’s important to have the title appear on the contact record
2. You can quickly add the primary affiliation reference on a contact when someone changes roles, but you’ll still have to manually go back and manage start dates and end dates
3. The status field on affiliations is not automated upon entering an end date.
4. If you have a web form that creates or updates contacts, a “Company” text field could also create confusion of where to record employment.
5. If tracking employment is critical to your mission, you don’t have a way to verify employment is up to date
6. It’s not easy to report out overlapping affiliations

COOKBOOK CHAPTERS:

Part 1 Decide what affiliations are to be used for

Part 2 Automate the Status field

Part 3 Align Title fields between Affiliations and Contacts

Part 4 Manage conflict between an online web form using a “Company” field and actual affiliation records.

Part 5 Create a process for staff to verify affiliation data (Coming soon)

Part 6 Find potential duplicate affiliations (Coming soon?)

Resources:

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