Eradicate Affiliation Contact without Affiliation Permanently
The client's mission is to improve the humanitarian system to save even more lives. This network of over 80 non-governmental organizations, from big international to local ones, are working together to address the problems in the humanitarian sector, like centralized power and decision-making and the resistance to a much-needed change.
Salesforce's NPSP comes with the default Automatic Affiliation Management setting.
It automatically creates an Affiliated Contact once a Contact record is created.
It is also how the client configured the NPSP setting.
Therefore, there were lots of Affiliated Contacts created without any role/Function or any affiliation.
So, they asked Application House to help them display only the Affiliated Contacts that have affiliation or Role/Function.
Affiliation on Salesforce refers to the relationship of a Contact with an Account. In NPSP, the affiliations track the association of individuals (the Contacts) with the Organization Accounts. It includes their present involvement with their organization, their employment history, and their volunteer experiences.
An Affiliated Contact record includes a Role/Function field, which describes the contact's role or affiliation with the organization.
They then opted for Mainstay, an engagement platform that increases student and staff interaction.
It allows them to communicate with students about their concerns and it has a chatbot that automatically replies to students but also allows them to request to talk to the actual advisors.
An affiliated contact with a role/function record is important when working with the organization.
So, if the Role/Function is empty, the record doesn't have much use because the role/function is what defined affiliation between contact and account.
This means that simply filtering what to display isn't addressing the actual problem.
The real problem is the continuous creation of affiliated contacts that have no Role/Function.
The client asked Application House to complete a task that they saw was the solution to their problem.
That is to filter out the affiliated contacts, displaying records only the ones with the Role/Function.
But we recognized that this request didn't eradicate the problem from the roots.
Selecting what to display does not stop users from continuously creating new affiliated contact records with empty Role/Function fields, which is not efficient and creates lots of records that take up data.
As such, the Application House team decided to get to the core.
First, we turned off the Automatic Affiliation Management setting to stop the system from automatically creating affiliated contacts.
Since someone can still manually create affiliated contact and leave the Role/Function field empty, to solve it, this field must be mandatory. There are two ways to do this:
(1) create a validation rule or
(2) make field required value on the layout. Application House chose to make the field required on the layout.
Next, we deleted the affiliated contact records with no Role/Function because they were incomplete and unnecessary. Of course, we communicated this with the client and showed them all the records to be deleted. Once we received their approval, we proceeded with the deletion.
With the implemented solution, one can't create an affiliated contact record if the Role/Function field is empty.
By making this mandatory, the client is now building a clearer record.
Therefore, more effective at helping them achieve their goals.
Application House completed the project by changing settings in NPSP. It takes genuine expertise to know that the best solution doesn't have to be the most sophisticated. We knew that using the settings was the most effective and efficient, and because of that, we accomplished the task in a timely and cost-efficient manner.
At Application House, our customer's success defines our success. We make sure that all engagements are carried out with end-to-end support from our consultants.
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