A key concepts primer to be distributed to new volunteers with Columbia Business School Alumni of MetroDC.

1. CLOUD MANGEMENT OF ALUMNI
CLUBS SERIES
SALESFORCE.COM ECOSYSTEM
Understanding & Using:
Accounts/Organizations, Contacts, Affiliations

2. CONVENTIONS
 Salesforce.com “Object Types” such as CONTACT, ACCOUNT,
ORGANIZATION, AFFILIATION will be presented in all-caps to
confirm their usage in a given sentence as referring to the
database-aspect of the word
 Such Object Types correspond closely (but not perfectly)with the
navigation tabs in Salesforce.com
 “Not perfectly” because tabs can be given a display alias that is
shorthand & human-centric
 Example: ACCOUNT is the Object Type and ORGANIZATION is the
tab alias for ACCOUNT

3. BUSINESS NEEDS MET – WITH
VARIATIONS IN TASK AND TYPE
 We use Salesforce.com to keep track of many kinds of alumni data
 Biographical Data tends to be non-dynamic
 Name; DoB; School Year
 Note: Household data is on occasion dynamic
 Employer and career data is more dynamic, and so we have
automated LinkedIn feeds
 Club-Alumni interactions, both outreach/marketing and event
participation

4. LOGGING IN:
LOGIN.SALESFORCE.COM
A Successful Login Takes you here

5. KEY TABS FOR ALUMNI VOLUNTEERS
 Contacts
 Organizations

6. ETYMOLOGY: USUALLY INSIGHTFUL
 Salesforce.com – the very name belies its origins in sales &
pipeline management.
 Whereas an alumni club is most interested in people,
sales/pipeline management is most interested in accounts
 Thus, Salesforce.com structures itself around ACCOUNTS
 As an alumni club, we’re not really worried about “leads” – which
makes skipping the lead to contact conversion process permissible

7. HIERARCHIES & RELATIONSHIPS
AMONG KEY OBJECT TYPES
 Centered on ACCOUNTS with CONTACTS
 ORGANIZATION records and CONTACT records are hierarchically related in a
ONE-to-MANY relationship (respective to the phrasing of this bullet, not the
salesfore header tab image above)
 An ORGANIZATION can exist without a CONTACT (if not very usefully) BUT (for
our purposes) a CONTACT cannot exist without an ORGANIZATION
 Affiliations represent time-bounded relationships among, say, an Alum and an
Employer
 As Affiliations do not have meaning externally to an alum and/or an employer,
there is no tab-level navigation to them
 They must be accessed within the specific record

8. CBS ALUMNI INSTANCE OF
SALESFORCE: AN ANALOGY
 Use an ACCOUNT Record with Naming Convention to Represent the
Alum
 MBA’97: Kowitt, Darren
 EMBA’08: Panos, Nicholas
 And create a CONTACT record on that Account for the Alum
 This initially counterintuitive approach yields benefits longer term as
intimacy grows with some alums and we would want to mange
HOUSEHOLDS
 Simply add a spousal contact to the Alum account – and you’ve got a
nice parallel to the Alum Household’s relationship to the school

9. WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE
Clicking on Darren
ACCOUNT RECORD VIEW
CONTACT RECORD VIEW

10. AFFILIATIONS ARE QUITE SIMPLE: 6 KEY
FIELDS
 Employer
 Alum
 Role
 Dates (where known)
 Status
 Email & phone have been
superseded by LinkedIn
integration

11. TYING IT ALL TOGETHER:
ADDING AN ALUM MANUALLY
 Typical example is an alum relocating to DC
who uses the website form to notify us

12. AN INVENTORY OF KEY TASKS WITH ADOBE
CAPITVATE TRAINING MATERIALS IN UNDER
DEVELOPMENT
 Adding alumni manually
 Sending a Vertical response email
 Sending a SendGrid email
 Data Hygiene Tasks
 Google Apps & Volunteer Collaboration & Project Management
 Web-presence: Wordpress, LinkedIn, Facebook
This document was prepared for Columbia Business
School Alumni of MetroDC by Succellerator SaaS