SFDC – Nonprofits – Product Development – Success Story

Client Overview

The client is a US based Service Provider, offering products and professional services that help nonprofits, public media stations and institutions of higher education to unlock the value of their greatest It is a leading enterprise nonprofit Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) solution provider.

Business Challenge

Nonprofit organizations are often held back due to lack of an upgraded, improved or modernized Constituent Relationship Management. The most commonly faced problems are:

  • The existing technology for CRM has not evolved with the growing social, mobile and online disruption in the industry

  • Most of the CRM solution suites are not available online or on mobile devices and lack integrated, multi-channel customer service capabilities

To overcome these challenges, client decided to develop a cloud-based Nonprofit Product with current technologies to transfer an organization’s fundraising and CRM infrastructure on a native Salesforce platform.

The objectives of the product to be developed were as listed below:

  • Upload data into batches and configure rules for it

  • Enable addition of different address for each season (Biographical address)

  • Assign tasks to users (Action Plan)

  • Define Account holder’s interests and preferences

  • Manage Contact’s relationships with organization and person

  • Manage types of giving records with associated transaction pipeline

  • Define transaction status, payment method and amount

  • Manage event logistics with fully customizable registration forms

  • Track attendees, manage venues and sessions

  • Integrate with Heartland and Sage payment gateways for online payment processing

Technical Requirements

  • Visualforce

  • Apex

  • JavaScript

  • JQuery

  • Data Loader

Solution Strategy

Development Methodology

  • Development on Developer edition orgs

  • Extensive use of JQuery, Visualforce pages, triggers, approval processes, workflows, email templates and classes

  • Design and development of workflows for automation of various processes

  • Development using SFDC standards and best practices

Eternus Solutions reviewed the business objectives and worked with the client to develop the product for Nonprofits Constituent Relationship Management, leveraging Force.com’s Apex, Packages and Visualforce as the implementation technology stack.

As per client’s requirement to aggregate functionalities into respective packages, following functionalities were developed and aggregated as managed packages:

  • Bios package to add biographical information about the constituent. It included the following features:

    • Biographical address to add different address for every season

    • Action Plans to quickly create a list of tasks from a template or define a custom task for a selected Account

    • Preference to set category wise interest of Account holder

    • Relationship to manage Contact’s relationships viz. Account-Contact and Contact-Contact

  • Giving package to manage types of Giving for all constituents in a single CRM. It included the following functionalities:

    • Gift tracking for annual membership

    • Total pipeline amount with individual transaction records

    • Membership allocation to general accounting units

    • Tribute information record to find membership Giving record information

  • In addition, Connect package also developed to join all packages and to upload all CRM data regularly into batches using Data loader.

  • Cost-effective product

  • Complete process automation

Salesforce-Sage Payment Gateway IntegrationEternus Solutions project team was responsible for bidirectional integration with Sage payment gateway, in order to connect and perform Card and Bank payment transactions from within Salesforce. It involved custom development to connect to Sage account using http callouts and to send payment card details using http callouts from Salesforce.

Salesforce-Heartland Payment Gateway IntegrationEternus Solutions project team was responsible for bidirectional integration with Heartland payment gateway, in order to connect and perform Card and Bank payment transactions from within Salesforce. It involved custom development to connect to Heartland account using http callouts and to send payment card details using http callouts from Salesforce.

Support and Enhancement The project involved improving upon existing components for code quality and code anomalies and building of new components as part of enhancement.

Solution Components

  • REST-based Web services for interfacing with Heartland and Sage payment gateways for online payment processing

  • Data loader and Batch processes to upload existing data provided by client

  • Use of encrypted text and mask type functionality for payment methods

  • Packaging of objects and functionality

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