It’s similar to Salesforce relationships, the difference being that a relationship is formed between two contacts and an affiliation is formed between a contact and an organization. In NPSP, a contact can have multiple affiliations but can only have one primary affiliation (and it’s not required to have any).
Full Answer
What is an affiliation in Salesforce?
An affiliation is a Salesforce object that links contacts with organizations. It’s similar to Salesforce relationships, the difference being that a relationship is formed between two contacts and an affiliation is formed between a contact and an organization.
What are affiliations and how do I use them?
Affiliations are great because they allow you to track a Contact's current and former Affiliations, so you can see your constituents' involvement in multiple organizations over time (as they move on to new jobs or join boards at different organizations, for example).
How do I create an organization affiliation?
Create an Affiliation 1 Navigate to the Contact or Organization Account where you would like to add the Affiliation. 2 Click the Related tab, then find the Organization Affiliations related list (on the Contact) or the Affiliated Contacts related list (on the Organization Account). 3 Click New. More items...
How do I edit a primary affiliation in Salesforce?
In the row for the Affiliation you want to modify, click , then click Edit. Make your edits and click Save. If you set an Affiliation to Primary and there is already another Primary Affiliation for that Contact, Salesforce switches the pre-existing Primary Affiliation status to Former, and unchecks the Primary option.
What are Salesforce affiliations?
An affiliation is a Salesforce object that links contacts with organizations. It's similar to Salesforce relationships, the difference being that a relationship is formed between two contacts and an affiliation is formed between a contact and an organization.
How do I create affiliation in Salesforce?
Create AffiliationsClick the Contacts tab from the navigation bar, search for an existing contact, and select their contact record. ... On the contact record, click Related.In the Organization Affiliations, click New.Fill out the New Affiliation form. ... (Optional) Check Primary.Click Save.
How do I create an affiliation?
How to create an affiliate program, step by stepChoose high average order value (AOV) products to promote. Your first step is to choose which products you want to include in your affiliate program. ... Decide your affiliate pricing and commission. ... Choose an affiliate management app. ... Recruit your affiliates. ... Manage affiliates.
What does your affiliation mean?
An affiliation is an official connection to something. To have an affiliation to something is to be affiliated with it. The Tea Party pretty clearly has an affiliation with the Republican Party. You can be connected to all sorts of things, but to have an affiliation is to have an official connection.
Affiliations
In addition to the Administrative Account and Household Account record types, EDA provides five other account record types out-of-the box:
Create an Account
To create an academic program, department, organization, educational institution, or a sports team, you create an account.
Create Affiliations and Primary Affiliations
After you’ve created accounts you can affiliate contacts with those accounts.
Why are affiliations useful?
Affiliations are a useful tool for managing a large network of constituents. They provide a 360-degree view by tracking connections within the organization and outside of it. When leveraged properly, the tool can lead to enhanced relationship management and data quality.
What is Salesforce NPSP?
That network grows in complexity when the same individual holds multiple roles within the organization and externally. Those responsible for tracking these networks often use a CRM to maintain a single and comprehensive source of truth. The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) allows organizations to track complex connections using Affiliations. In this post we will explain how to leverage Salesforce Affiliations for a nonprofit use case.
Learning Objectives
Organization Accounts in NPSP
- Organization accounts let you group individual contacts together to represent an agency, company, team, institution, division, cadre, crew, squad, and any other collection of people. (Except a household. There are household accounts for that.) As a nonprofit, you might want to create an organization account for a foundation that supports your nonprofit, partner agencies, …
Create An Organization Account
- No More Homelessness (NMH) recently established a relationship with a corporate philanthropy team at Cloud Kicks, a sneaker company that designs personalized sneakers for its customers. The philanthropy team is interested in partnering with NMH to start a donation program, and employees at the regional office are also interested in volunteering together at NMH. Anthony, th…
Contacts + Organizations = Affiliations
- An affiliation is a Salesforce object that links contacts with organizations. It’s similar to Salesforce relationships, the difference being that a relationship is formed between two contacts and an affiliation is formed between a contact and an organization. In NPSP, a contact can have multiple affiliations but can only have one primary affiliatio...
Create Affiliations
- So what about creating that affiliation? No problem. As the Program Director at NMH, Gordon Chu has been managing the relationship with Erica, so he’s going to take care of creating the affiliation. He can do it from an account or contact record. Whichever place he goes to create an affiliation, the object fields are the same and should be intuitive, but he needs to be careful with …
Resources
- Documentation: Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) Documentation
- Documentation:Add and Manage Organization Accounts
- Video:NPSP How-To Series: Organizational Primary Contact
Learning Objectives
Affiliations
- In addition to the Administrative Account and Household Account record types, EDA provides five other account record types out-of-the box: 1. Academic Program 2. Business Organization 3. Educational Institution 4. Sports Organization 5. University Department Any time you create a connection between a constituent (contact) and any of the above accounts, you create an affilia…
Create An Account
- To create an academic program, department, organization, educational institution, or a sports team, you create an account. 1. Click the Accounts tab and click New. 2. Select the record type for the account and click Next. For example, if you’re creating an account for a high school, select Educational Institution. We use Lake Oswego Senior High School in the next example, so consid…
Create Affiliations and Primary Affiliations
- After you’ve created accounts you can affiliate contacts with those accounts. 1. Navigate to the contact for whom you want to create an affiliation. In this example, we navigate to Miguel Parker’s contact record so that we can affiliate him with one high school, two academic departments, and a sports team. 2. In the Affiliated Accounts related list...
Resources
- Documentation:Configure Affiliations Settings
- Documentation: Account
- Documentation: Affiliations
When to Use Affiliations
Track Multiple Affiliations Per Contact
- The Affiliation object’s ability to track a contact’s connections makes it particularly useful for nonprofit use cases. When tracking a board member, for example, staff need to know whether the member is also serving as Chair and what their service dates are. The example below depicts Melissa’s ‘Primary’ Affiliation as a board member since 2014. Her historic role as Chair between …
Affiliation Best Practices
- The Affiliation object can be a useful tool for many organizations, but it is not perfect. The NPSP Role field is a text field, which can lead to inconsistency and inaccurate reporting. To maintain high data quality some organizations create a custom picklist field to replace the Role field. This will avoid human error such as spelling mistakes and...
Summary + Conclusion
- Affiliations are a useful tool for managing a large network of constituents. They provide a 360-degree view by tracking connections within the organization and outside of it. When leveraged properly, the tool can lead to enhanced relationship management and data quality.