This Salesforce instance was of considerable complexity and scale.

Church Planting has been called “the single most effective evangelistic methodology under heaven” because a passionate group of engaged believers functions like a cutting or a seed – to grow a church (of the same denomination as the parent) and its success is to stand on its own: self-propagating, self-supporting and self-governing from inception. And their goals are impressively lofty:  “We won’t stop until every child has a church.” Both domestically and internationally.

So Stadia uses Salesforce not to harvest donation dollars (though it does do that with a robust Planned Giving program) so much as to identify members of church congregations nationwide who have the leadership, calling and passion to be the force that drives the growth.

You can tell that there is fundraising and ‘church planter seed’ harvesting by looking at this screenshot of the page layouts that I’m adding a unique foreign key field to so we can always map the data in Salesforce to the row in the data dump provided to me.

The release I worked on included enhancements to the data model, importing 50,000+ congregation members as Salesforce Leads (with the Company Field = “Last Name, First Name Household”, in a departure from how it’s usually done in NPSP, and likely very unfamiliar to commercial Sales/commerce instances, an to figure out how to enhance data standards and hygiene level by normalizing the denominations and creating look up relationships.

Oh, and create a junction object, because a key Lead-level set of attributes (the types of pastoral skills that the potential Church Planter possesed in greatest abundance)  — there was no rhyme or reason to it. Some individuals had one; some nine. So a matrix of checkboxes really wouldn’t be the right approach.  Stress test things in the sandbox, then deploy change sets of metadata to production — and load’er up again.

View the Sway for more information.

 

 

Project Model:

Sub-contractor to Cloud Mine Consulting, who owned the relationship with Stadia.

Winter 2017/18