Soapbox Engage Blog

You’ve got data. It’s nice data. It’s data about people and places and things. It’s members and donors and clients and locations and dues and grants and lions and tigers and bears (oh my!). And all of that lovely data is safely and securely stored in your Salesforce.com account.

But you’re a giving, sharing kind of person. You’re not a greedy and selfish and man-sized-safe-in-your-office secretive kind of person. You want to share that data. Not everything, mind you! That would be just self-absorbed foolishness. But you want to share important bits and pieces that will be valuable to your website visitors and beneficial in achieving your mission.

With our Soapbox Engage service, you can do just that - and you can display it in more ways than you can shake a stick at. And my grandmother told me that’s a lot of ways when I asked her what the heck she meant when she used that expression back when I was growing up.

Basically, you got yourself a three-step process here, ya see? Step One is decidin’ which one object in Salesforce you want to display data from. That’s plum easy. You’ve got your Contacts or your Organizations or some such custom object doohickey you or some smarty-pants Salesforce consultant built for you.

Step Two is decidin’ how you want to filter that data and if you want to give your website visitors a search form so they can filter by some of their own preferences. Just want to show all of your active members in your Organizations object? Plum easy. Want to show only your active members in your Organizations object but have a little form displayed to your website visitors so they can search by organization name? You guessed it! Plum easy.

Why plums are so much easier than other fruit is something I never asked my grandmother.

Step Three is choosing which fields in that there object you want to show on the results list and the subsequent full record view - and where exactly those fields should show up. Now, the part after the dash is where things can get a might dizzying with all the possibilities we throw at you.

You see, we like choices. Choices are good. We also like things to look pretty. Not sissified put-a-pink-dress-on-your-piano-playing-pig pretty but sensible and fashionable and well-presented pretty.

Now, when you're choosing from all of those fields in Salesforce that you want to show on your website, you can put them in different positions. A lot of different positions! Four when it comes to the initial results list view, to be exact, and a full nine when you get to the full record detail view.

"I don't have a clue what the heck you're talking about now, sonny!" you might be saying right now. Come to think of it, that's another thing my grandmother used to say, too! Well, how about a couple pictures? We'll skip the search form and jump straight to all the options you have for displaying the results list and the full record. Feel free to take your time to digest things. I'll wait until you're ready.

Salesforce Data: View Positions for results List View and record Detail View

Ready?

What you're looking at there with all of the labels and text and images is Salesforce data pulled from a Salesforce account and displayed in any which way on a website, first for the results list view and then for the detail record view that is linked to from the results list view. That could be YOUR Salesforce data displayed on YOUR website in any which way YOU would like to display it so you can make your life easier by updating data once in Salesforce and letting your website visitors peek at what you want them to see.

Do you like what YOU see? Learn more, see examples, and sign up for a trial of the Directories app here! You can also view other apps available in the Soapbox Engage online engagement suite and discover how they can supercharge your nonprofit's mission here.