Working with Federal Poverty Guidelines in Salesforce (part 1 of 2)

Many nonprofits, particularly human-services focused nonprofits, have to incorporate federal poverty guidance information into their program management and reporting. This can be a bit of a pain to do, so we’ve put together a tiny Salesforce package to provide a helping hand!

This requires the Nonprofit Starter Pack Version 3, using the Household Account Model.  The fields that we add are on the Account object, and we are assuming that a family unit is reflected in Salesforce as one data item in the Account record for the “household” and multiple contacts attached to that Account.  This will not work with the 1:1 or bucket model, but the videos in this series will show you how to build it yourself (stay tuned for part 2!).  Take a look at the overview video for full details.

Nonprofit Starter Pack version 3 with the Household Account model:

1. Salesforce Installation Package, which will add 3 new fields to your Account object, and will add a Custom Setting to contain the Federal Poverty guidance (available on the AppExchange)
2. A spreadsheet (as a CSV) for upload to the Custom Settings, to populate the current guidance data. Download the CSV here: 2018FederalPovertyGuidance

Note that you must download the spreadsheet and follow the post-install instructions to finish setup!

 

Video Tutorials:

1. An Overview of what the package contains, and what it does
2. Installation and Post-Installation instructions
3. Advanced: A technical overview of all of the pieces (Part 2)
4. Advanced: How to set up your own (Part 2)

 

Overview

Installation and Setup

 

Installation Instructions:

We highly recommend that you watch the installation video.  While we would love to provide support to everyone, we simply can’t, so please know that you need at least a minimum amount of Salesforce admin experience to install this, or follow carefully with the video.

Step by step instructions are below:

1. Ensure you have the Nonprofit Starter Pack 3 with Household Account Model before beginning
   1. Log in to your Salesforce
   2. Go to Nonprofit Starter Pack settings.  Note: if you don’t have a single, consolidated Settings page (as shown in the video) you don’t have the NPSP3.
   3. Click on the People link in the left nav
   4. Choose “Account Model” from the left nav
   5. Make sure “Account Model” says Household Account. If it does not, please skip to the technical tutorial to “roll your own”!
2. Review the Overview video for context, if you haven’t already.
3. Install the package from the AppExchange (note: we recommend installing in a Sandbox first)
4. Review the elements in the package.  You should see several custom fields, a custom setting object, and 3 new fields for Account: household income, percent federal poverty guideline, and federal bracket.
5. Click Continue
6. Click “Next” on the next screen – no extended object permissions are required
7. Grant access as appropriate.  Typically, you grant access to anybody who would be entering or using this data.  Make sure you grant access to Systems Administrators as a minimum, and any program staff who need to enter data. Click “Next”
8. Click “Install”
9. Proceed to Configuration Instructions

Configuration Instructions:

1. Add the fields to your Account page layout.
   1. Edit your Household page layout
   2. Add a section: Household Income Information (or whatever makes sense for your program)
   3. Find the fields Household Income, Federal Bracket, and Percent Federal Poverty Guideline and drag them into the new section
2. If you’re using the default NPSP Account page, add Household Income to the Account Field Set
   1. Go to Setup->Customize->Account and click “Field Set”
   2. Click “Edit” next to Manage Household Custom
   3. Drag “Household Income” into the field set. Click “Save.”

Upload Federal Poverty Guideline Settings Data:

1. Download the CSV file that we have prepared for you.
2. Go to dataloader.io and allow it to access your Salesforce (note: you must be logged into Salesforce first)
3. Choose “New Task”
4. Choose “Insert”
5. Select the “Insert” operation
6. Find FederalPovertyGuideline object
7. Click “Next”
8. Click “Upload” to upload the CSV file that you downloaded in step 1
9. Your fields should auto-match.  If not, double-check the prior steps.
10. Click “Next”
11. Review your project – “1 Row” to insert is what we expect.
12. Save and Run.

Congratulations! You can now track constituent data as a percentage of the Federal Poverty Guidelines.