In Salesforce, every Contact record must be attached to an Account. There are a few ways this is handled:
- 1-to-1, every contact has a dummy Account
- Every contact is attached to a single Account (1 Account many Contacts)
- Households: Every contact is attached to a household and where it is known that two contacts share a household (either declared or based on address), then they will have the same account. When people say ‘Household’ in Salesforce, this is an Account behind the scenes.
- There may in practice be some mix of households, actual ‘organisation’ Accounts, 1 & 2.
Dataro handles Salesforce data driven by the Contact. We are scoring the Contact based on Opportunities and CampaignMembers etc that are attached directly to the Contact. This works better in scenarios 1 & 2.
In the case of Households, the Opportunities can be linked to the Household, but Salesforce also requires you to link them to one of the Contacts. Dataro will be scoring the Contact record based on the opportunities, etc. it is directly linked to. So if one Contact in the Household has all the opportunities, they are going to get the high score and the other person may not get scored at all. This is exactly what would happen in any other CRM. The only difficult case is where the Opportunities are split between multiple people in the Household, in which case they will all get scored individually and probably differently and probably lower than if it was a single person. In the vast majority of instances, this case is a very small minority of the database.
If you wish to ensure that you are sending a Household donation request, you can do a household merging on your side prior to sending a fundraising communication. However, in our experience it is best to send to each member of the household individually, based on their Dataro ranks.