Affiliations and Relationship Management using Salesforce® non profit service pack

Power of Salesforce’s NPSP to Manage Affiliations and Relationships

NPSP provides a strong and rigid way to maintain relationship between different donors in the non-profit. Relationships are key elements that every non-profit organization keeps track of. NPSP maintains the relationship broadly categorized in two categories:

• Relationships: Relationships are actual human relationships that exists between two humans. Thus, we can maintain the actual relationships between two donors in NPSP using Relationships. These are strictly individual relationship i.e. the relationships between two individual donors. For ex. Father-Son is a type of individual relationship.
• Affiliations: Affiliations provides a way to maintain organizational relationships i.e. the relationship between an organizational donor and an individual donor in the system. These can also be termed as Organizational Relationships in NPSP. For ex. Employee-Employer relationship is a type of organizational relationship.

Relationships and Reciprocal Relationship Maintenance

NPSP Manages relationships and related reciprocal relationships automatically. User need to configure the relationship-reciprocal relationship pair in NPSP settings in the salesforce org. Once this is configured, user can create relationship record on one donor related to another donor, once this is created NPSP automatically creates a reciprocal relationship based on the configuration done in NPSP settings.

Linking Soft Credit Allocations with Affiliation and Relationships

Soft Credits are credits for the driving forces behind the pledges. Pledges are usually influenced by some people from the societies like Household Members, Colleagues etc. This can be maintained in NPSP and can be allocated automatically. Influencers in NPSP are maintained as Opportunity Contact Role records on Pledge. These Contact Roles are directly related with the pledge which provides a way to maintain the influencers of the pledge.

User can add Household Members and Colleagues as Opportunity Contact Role records on the pledge either manually or can be done using automated triggers on the Opportunity Object. Whenever an Opportunity record gets created, this trigger will fire and checks for all the household members of the donor who is making pledge and will create Opportunity Contact Role on the pledge record.

There can be other use-case where an organization is making a pledge and wants to give soft credits to their employees. This can be achieved via Affiliations on the organizations. All the employees can be linked as affiliation records to the organization, and when an organization makes a pledge the trigger will fire and will check for all the affiliation records related to the organizational donor and will create the Opportunity Contact Role records on the Pledge (or Opportunity).

Once all the Opportunity Contact Roles records are available on the pledge, standard npsp nightly job will execute and allocates soft credits to the donors added opportunity contact role on the pledge.