We currently create our donor research profiles in Word and attach them as Files to Account records. The profile contains Contact info (name, email, phone, mailing address), some giving history, and data from external sources. We would like to transition this to Salesforce. My preliminary idea is a custom object with fields for data that doesn't already live somewhere else, then some sort of mail merge tool (we have Apsona) that merges it all together in one document. Has anyone built anything like this,or used a third party tool they recommend?
We are on NPSP with no immediate plans to move to NPC.
@Nonprofit Success Pack #Nonprofit Success PackA custom object sounds like a good approach, especially if you want donor profiles to become searchable and reportable rather than keeping them as Word files. I’d also use Salesforce relationships to pull existing contact and giving data instead of duplicating it. For external nonprofit or organization research, something like the Nonprofit Check Plus API could potentially help automate verification and enrich profiles before Apsona merges everything into a final document. The key is designing the data model first, so you don’t end up recreating the same information in multiple places.