One thing that non-profit Salesforce users run into right away is Accounts and Contacts. If you’re coming from a classic non-profit database, this distinction is confusing, and there’s a real tendency to use Accounts for reports and day to day work. I always encourage people to resist that urge.
If you ask your Salesforce expert, can we do X on Accounts, the answer is almost always yes. The important question to ask is not if it can be done, but if you’ll be glad you did it that way in a year or two. Frequently with Account vs. Contact things, you’re really choosing between making a small behavior change now and then being able to use lots of native Salesforce functionality versus no behavior change now and losing access to all of that native functionality and having to maintain the more customized choice you’ve made. When you’re sitting down in front of a new system, that small behavior change seems big because you’re adapting to a lot of new things. I always recommend giving yourself some time as you get used to the new system – a change you can’t imagine making might seem quite manageable a few weeks later.
The smaller and more budget-constrained an organization is, the more important it is to go with the minimal amount of customizations. Salesforce is powerful because it allows so many, but every custom choice you make has to be maintained over time, by the people who will do your job after you. Try to be as kind to them as you can.
Why focus on Contacts?
In short, native functionality and integrations are pretty Lead and Contact focused, and so your life will be easier if you go with the flow.
Salesforce assumes that Contact information like phone number and email belongs primarily on the Contact. Salesforce assumes that you’ll use Contacts for sending emails and Campaigns and things like that. There are ways to do these things with Accounts, but in my experience they leave you swimming upstream. The more closely your instance matches what most of the ecosystem is doing, the more benefit you can get (for free!) from Salesforce’s investment in the platform. The more special your instance is, the more you have to keep layering workarounds on top of workarounds, and seeing new features that don’t help you.
Another huge advantage of using Salesforce is access to the thousands of integrations available. They tend to be very focused on Contacts or Leads, because that what most Salesforce users are focused on. Email integrations are particularly focused on Leads and Contacts, and if you’ve got an Account-focused Salesforce instance, integrating with any of them is very difficult.
How to focus on Contacts
Focusing on Contacts means that you rarely use Account reports (although there are certainly uses for them, even in a very Contact-focused instance,) and that when users are working with records, they’re looking at and updating Contacts rather than Accounts. There are a couple of steps to take over and over to stay focused on Contacts.
New fields
If you’re being asked to add new fields to the Account record, this is a good time to take a look and see if the information ought to be (or is already) on the Contact. You may need a new Account field, but you might need to change your page layouts so that users can see Contact information easily from the Account page.
In general, keeping data in one place is often sufficient. If you’re trying to focus on Accounts, you’ll likely find yourself trying to copy information from Contacts to Accounts and vice-versa. This gets messy fast! Sometimes we need to copy things to different records, but don’t do it unless you have to – it is just one more thing to break on some Giving Tuesday down the road.
Page layouts
One way to encourage users to focus on Contacts is to make Account page layouts pretty minimal. Lightning layouts make it much easier to show users Contact information from the Account page, which also helps.
Reports
As an admin, you can run a list of Reports that have been run recently, and if there are any Reports in that list that have a Report Type of Account instead of Contacts and Accounts, take a closer look! If this is a Report that could be a Contacts and Accounts Report, get your users to make the switch now. If there are Account reports that make sense to keep, make sure you understand why they’re necessary. NPSP’s Primary Contact field is really helpful here, as there are plenty of situations where a Contacts and Accounts Report is a good choice, but you want only one row per Account.
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