Nonprofit Use Case for Salesforce Web to Lead Form

Background

The Epilepsy Foundation of Eastern Pennsylvania (EFEPA) wanted the ability to have the information requests from the website to be fed directly into Salesforce.  The existing process consisted of the constituent completing a form on the website which sent an email to a staff member who manually keyed the information into Salesforce and manually sent an acknowledgement to the submitter.    Although this process worked, it was very time consuming to manually key in the data and it left room for data entry errors.  It also increased the time between the request submission and when the constituent received confirmation of the request.  

EFEPA was looking for a low cost solution that would feed information directly into Salesforce, automate a response to the person submitting the request and allow for reporting of statistics on requested areas.  They also wanted a notification to the appropriate staff person that a request had been submitted and needed some type of action.  The solution BackOffice Thinking helped them implement leveraged Salesforce’s standard web to lead process.

Information Request Process Before Web to Lead

Information Request Process After Web to Lead Implemented

Solution Set

The solution set consisted of the following:

• Custom fields on the Lead and Contact objects are used to store the selections captured from the information requests.
• Salesforce web to lead form to accept requests via the website and feeds them directly into Salesforce populating the information requested fields as well as lead source and other important fields via hidden fields on the web form.
• Auto-response rules, lead assignment and email templates are used in combination to acknowledge submission to contact and notify EFEPA staff.
• Workflow rules create follow-up tasks for staff.
• Formula fields are used to convert the checkbox values to display the text equivalent of items chosen by the submitter rather than checkbox 0/1 values.
• Reports show statistics on items requested over time and allow for reporting on the converted leads original submission history.

CAPTURING INFORMATION

When using the Web to Lead process to capture information about consituents you will need to create the fields to support the process on both the Lead and Contact objects.  Be careful to use the same field types and values for the fields on both objects.  Once the fields are created, a mapping needs to be setup between the two objects.  This is done through the Lead Field Mapping process which is found on the Leads setup Fields page in the Lead Custom Fields & Relationships section.  Note – custom Lead fields can only be mapped to custom Contact fields.

Generating the Web to Lead Form

Salesforce automates the process of generating HTML to collect data.  The form is generated from Setup > Customize > Leads > Web-to-Lead.  Make sure that Web-to-Lead is enabled and you have set a staff member as the default lead creator.  If you have more than one person who can be assigned incoming leads, you can use lead assignment rules to assign them based upon criteria you define.

1. Select fields you want to appear on your webform.
2. Specify the page to which the person will be taken when the form is submitted.  Note – this should be an existing page on your website.

Click the Generate button to generate the HTML for your new form.

Copy the HTML code generated to use on a web page on your website.  Your webmaster should know how to use the HTML code generated.

Understanding the use of hidden fields

Hidden fields can be used on your form to populate fields within Salesforce without displaying them on the form to the end user.  Below describes some hidden input fields used to populate key fields which were not visible to the user completing the form.

1. <input name=”oid”  type=”hidden”  value=”00Di0000000bkUC” />– Hidden field tells the form the Salesforce org to which it is associated.
2. <input name=”lead_source”  type=”hidden”  value=”Web2Lead-IR” /> – Hidden field sets the value of the Lead Source field on the Leads object.  This is important as it allows workflow rules set up in Salesforce to identify the incoming request and send appropriate acknowledgements.
3. <input name=”recordType”  type=”hidden”  value=”012i0000000xhZu” /> – Hidden field sets the value of the record type of the Lead.  This is only needed if you have record types associated with the Leads object.  If you are using the Nonprofit Starter Pack (NPSP) most likely you will not.
4. <input name=”Company”  type=”hidden”  value=”Individual” /> – Hidden field sets the value of the Company field on the Lead object.  The field is hidden because the contacts filling out the request form are filling it out on behalf of themselves and are not associated with an organization.  In this example the value is being set to Indivdual because EFEPA uses CauseView.  If you are using the NPSP you would set the value to “Self.”  This is important because when you convert the record the value of the Company field affects the behavior of the conversion process.

SETTING UP AN AUTO-RESPONSE

The Auto-response feature can be used to set up responses to the submitter from the incoming web to lead submissions.  Using rules, different responses can be sent to submitters based on criteria you define.  In the example below, a rule is setup to send a specific email templated response based upon the Lead Source field value we populated from a hidden field on our form.

1. Enter a sort order value which is used to control the order by which the rules will be evaluated if you have more than one rule defined.  The rules are evaluated in ascending order and the process exits once the rule condition is true.  For more information on auto-response rules see: https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=creating_auto_response_rules.htm&language=en_US
2. Set your criteria for when this rule should be used.
3. Enter how you want the email sender’s name and address to appear on the email the submitter receives.
4. Choose the email template that should be sent to the constituent upon submission of the form.  Note – you must first set up a template before you can select it here.

Save when finished or Save & New if you are defining more than one auto-response rule.

Using Formula Fields

If your form uses checkbox fields for responses that populate corresponding checkbox fields within Salesforce, you may want to create formula fields to display the text representation of the data for use on your email templates.  The examples below show one possible way of using formula fields for displaying text instead of 0/1 checkbox values and how to display values from multi-select picklist fields.

Example 1: IF statements determine if checkbox field is checked, if yes then it displays text to describe the checked item.  

Example 2: Formula evaluates the data stored in the mulit-select picklist field and displays the appropriate corresponding text.  

Results of using formula fields in email template

REPORTS

When a lead is converted, a certain amount of visiblity into the original data submitted is lost.  Since the lead record is still stored in Salesforce, reports can be used to reference the original lead record data.

Sample report to show statistics by request area:

When a lead is converted the Contact ID of the converted lead is written to the Lead object.  This can be referenced on a report to create a custom report link on the Contact record to view the original Lead information.

Sample report to show statistics by request area:

Custom Link on Contact Object

By implementing Salesforce’s web to lead process, EFEPA has been able to improve a process that previously was manually intensive and time consuming.  If you have any other process that you need to automate, we can help you with that.