Creating a Contact Record

All employees, affiliated researchers, research staff, donors, partners, and any other person with whom J-PAL conducts business must be entered as a Contact in Salesforce. All contacts are related to an organization, typically their employer. Note: if the contact’s organization doesn’t already exist in Salesforce before you create the contact page. 

If a contact’s organization is unknown, you can relate them to the organization called “general” ; however, this should only be a last resort.

Please make sure the contact does not already exist before creating a new one (try searching by email address, nicknames, etc).

To create a new contact, go to the contacts section and click the “new” button. There are several contact types:

Priority - This is the most common record type used for J-PAL contacts

Affiliate - Record type for affiliates, note most NA staff do not have SF permission to create a new affiliate record

Invited Researcher - Record type for invited researchers, note most NA staff do not have SF permission to add new invited researcher terms

Standard- Record type for contacts imported from the website or marketing emails

Please fill in as much information as you can about a contact (this might require some googling!)However, key fields that must be included are: Email, Position type, Department/program, all interest tags as applicable particularly Region, Country, Sector (as applicable), Initiative (as applicable), J-PAL office. While tags may seem repetitive, failure to properly tag organizations means that they will not appear in any of our reports.

Please do not check off any email subscription check boxes.

If a contact changes organizations, update their organization in the Organization name field. Then go to the “related” tab and for their former organization, click the triangle drop down → edit → update the status to “former” and add dates if known. Current organization should be updated to “current.” Note: for former J-PAL staff, HR needs to update their status with J-PAL upon their departure, any staff can then follow the steps above to update employment information.