This is just a short PowerPoint outlining a few "best practices" in some of Salesforce's most important records.

1. 1
Opportunities
- Transactions,
usually financial
- Rolls up to Account
Salesforce Basic Objects and Their Relationships
Accounts
- Organizations, Individuals, Families
- Many Contacts belong to one
- Many Opportunities belong to one
Tie an Opportunity
To a Contact
Via Contact Roles.
- Donor
- Soft Credit
Account
Account
Campaigns
Track effectiveness of outreach initiatives
- Gather targeted Contacts via reporting
- Tie the Contacts to a Campaign
- Tie incoming Opportunities to the Campaign
- Gain ability to report on ROI
Contacts
(Individuals)

2. 2
Salesforce Best Practices: Accounts
Accounts should be created for:
• Organizations (companies, nonprofits, schools, foundations)
• Individuals
• Households (two or more people living in the same place that share financial
responsibility, should receive one piece of postal mail for outreach activities, and
should receive credit for fees and donations as a unit.
Account record types should be created to:
• Differentiate fundamentally different types of interactions.
• Allow permissions to be restricted based on record type.
• Allow page views to reflect different data needs.
• The most common record type split is Organization and Household (which includes
households of one person)
Nonprofit Starter Pack best practice:
• Allow the NPSP to automatically create an Account for each individual (the 1:1
Model), and group the individuals together using the NPSP Household object.
• Using the “bucket” model is discouraged as it makes donation tracking and
reporting difficult.

3. 3
Salesforce Best Practices: Contacts
A Contact Record is created to capture relatively persistent information about
individuals.
• For example, you would store an email address and a phone number on the contact
record.
• You would also store gender, race/ethnicity, birthdate, martial status, and other relatively
persistent attributes of a person on his or her contact record.
Organization Contacts:
• Allows you to identify individuals whose primary relationship with you is through their
organization.
• Put another way, if this person were to leave the organization, the relationship with the
organization would continue and the relationship with the person would terminate.
Individual or Household contacts:
• Allow you to identify individuals whose primary relationship with you is as a private
citizen.
• Put another way, you may know where this person works but that information does not
define his or her relationship with you.

4. 4
Salesforce Best Practices: Opportunities
An Opportunity record is created to track a financial transaction.
• Each Account will have many Opportunities.
• A summary of Opportunities (for example: total giving for last year) can appear on an
Account page layout, and allow easier reporting.
• Opportunities are tracked by Stage, to allow for lifecycle tracking for financial activities.
For example, a pledge has a defined lifecycle in most organizations:
• Pledge => invoice => received/closed or lost/written off.
• You would create ONE Opportunity for this pledge, and change its status to reflect the
donor’s status at any given time.
• You can create reports of opportunities that have not been received, to allow for easier
tracking and follow up.
• You can create workflow (automatic actions) that occur, such as reminder emails and
timed reminders to follow up on an opportunity.
The Account is the “official” parent record for all Opportunities.
• Tie individuals (Contacts) to an Opportunity by using the Contact Roles related list.
• You can set up any type of contact role that reflects your organization: Donor, Soft Credit,
Influencer, and Decision-maker, are common roles.

5. 5
Salesforce Best Practices: Campaigns
A Campaign is used to track the return on your outreach efforts.
• Generally in nonprofits, campaigns are the prompts to get people to give you money.
Campaigns can be structured hierarchically.
• For example, most organizations have an Annual Appeal.
• If the prompts that you use during the Annual Appeal are email blasts, a postcard, and a
phone-a-thon, you would structure your campaign as:
• Annual Appeal 2013
- Annual Appeal 2013 Phone-a-Thon
- Annual Appeal 2013 First Email Blast
- Annual Appeal 2013 Second Email Blast
- Annual Appeal 2013 Postcard
• This allows donations that come in response to the Postcard to be tracked separately, in
addition to summarizing all Annual Appeal activities at the parent level for easy
reporting.
Campaigns, by themselves, don’t do anything.
• They are mostly just tracking mechanisms to allow you to easily see:
• how many people you reached with a given effort,
• how much revenue was generated,
• and which of the people you reached actually responded.

6. 6
Salesforce Best Practices: Managing Campaigns
To set up and manage the Annual Appeal campaign described in the last slide:
1. Decide which of your contacts should receive the postcard, emails, and phone calls.
• For example, everyone with a valid email address, who has not opted out of email,
might be attached to the Annual Appeal 2013 First Email Blast, but only those who
didn’t respond to the first email would be attached to the Annual Appeal 2013
Second Email Blast.
2. Set up reports to select just those contacts decided in step 1, and click “Add to
Campaign” to associate an individual with a campaign.
• When you connect an individual to a campaign, you gain the ability to track the
lifecycle of that individual’s engagement with the campaign through the status
field.
• Default values on the status field are are “Sent” and “Responded” but you could
define “Sent,” “RSVP’d” and “Attended” for an event, for example.
3. Execute your campaign.
• For example, use the campaign members on your Annual Appeal 2013 First Email
Blast to create the email list that actually receives the email in question.
4. When money comes in response to a campaign, track it by entering the Primary
Campaign Source on the Opportunity Field.
• For example, if someone gives an online donation after receiving an email, select
“Annual Appeal 2013 First Email Blast” as the Primary Campaign Source so you
can tie those dollars to the email outreach activity.