My friend, and Greensboro, NC based nonprofit tech guru Trish Perkins, recently asked me about connecting a WordPress based website with Salesforce.com’s database system (which is FREE for 501(c)(3) nonprofits by the way). I thought sharing my answer with everyone might be useful. These solutions will work for any website, but I’ve given specific instruction for one based on WordPress.
Web-To-Case
The first thing that comes to mind is setting up the web-to-case functionality in Salesforce, and then linking to the web-to-case form or embedding it in your WordPress site. In Salesforce.com’s own words:
“With Web-to-Case, you can gather customer support requests directly from your company’s website and automatically generate up to 500 new cases a day. This can help your organization respond to customers faster, thus improving the productivity of your support team.”
To learn more about setting up web-to-case, check out Salesforce.com’s excellent help and training here:
http://na2.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/customize_casecapture.htm
Email-To-Case
There is also a system to do email-to-case. Again, in Salesforce.com’s words:
“Salesforce.com can automatically create a case when an email is sent to one of your company’s email addresses, such as support@company.com. This Email-to-Case functionality auto-populates case fields from the content of each email. For example, an email subject heading becomes a case subject.”
If you use email-to-case then you could either have people send in emails, or you coud use Contact Forms 7 (WordPress only) on your site (or some other form system) to make a form that once completed is emailed to the Salesforce system. To learn more about email-to-case, check out the help here: http://na2.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/customizesupport_email.htm
What’s your voodoo?
Have you accomplished this goal in a different way? What was your technique?
