Hi, I recently switched over from VerticalResponse's web-to-lead procedure and I'm trying to emulate some of its convenience and simplicity. (I am using the Nonprofit Starter Kit.) I have been through the support/help files and am empty-handed, so here I am.

1) Is a way to either automatically convert every lead into a contact, or batch convert leads, without creating a task or logging a donation? We have a designation for people who contact us, which is simply "Interested." I'd like to make it so that everyone who signed up through the site was automatically a contact marked Interested with something in their Description field like, "Web-to-lead signup." I have seen some help files about mapping Lead fields into Contact fields, but nothing about automatically converting them.

2) I would like to send an email to the administrator when a new web-to-lead is created. This, I think, is fairly easy and is accomplished from sending web-to-leads in to a queue and notifying the owner of the queue.

Clearly, most of my attention is focused on #1 above, to simplify the process of gathering leads and contact information from the website. Is there a trigger or something I can set up to accomplish this? I appreciate any help.Ryan

Hi. I recently instituted a web-to-lead form on our website, and I received advice that asking for a visitor's ZIP code is a nice non-intrusive way of gathering useful, but still ambiguous, information about where they live. This, in turn, is useful for all kinds of segmenting, obviously.

So, now I have a database with some rather poor data quality: some records have just addresses with no ZIP, some have ZIPs without a city, barely any have a county entered, etc.

I'm wondering if there is a relatively simple way to harvest this kind of information from an address. In fact, I won't be greedy, I'll settle for determining county from a ZIP code, which seems like it would be the easiest – ZIPs are a standardized format, as opposed to city names or addresses. There are two paid apps in the app store (PostCode and AddressGrabber), but we are a nonprofit, so the cheaper we can get this done, the better.

I wonder if there is some way to write an S-Control that would harvest the city information with a process like this:

1) Enter a ZIP into MapQuest, by calling up this address: http://www.mapquest.com/maps?zipcode=[ZIP]

2) Get the source and harvest the title of the resulting URL by parsing this formula: "Map of [CITY, STATE] by MapQuest"

Can this be done with relatively a simple Javascript, built into an S-Control? And then where to go from there?

I have a very long formula field set up to assign zones (our segmentation scheme) from counties, but it is just one huge hand-coded switch/case syntax. An approach like that is completely impractical for something like ZIPs or Cities.

Thanks in advance.

Ryan 

Hi, I'm working with a database full of inmates (and some non-inmates) and managing their records. I would like to devise a system where I can choose the prison in which inmates are located from a dropdown list, and then it would automatically fill their mailing address, since we occasionally correspond with them.

Conceptually, this is something that could be done by creating custom objects, right? If I had a class of object called prison, and then each prison had a mailing address, I think I should be able to autofill the mailing address of a prisoner if we relate them to a certain prison object. Is this correct, or no?

Or, is it something that can be done with a custom record type for a prison that would just have its name and address, and then declare some sort of relationship between a record type "prison" and a record type "inmate" so that it autofills their address if they are related to a prison?

I am worried about making their mailing address a lookup field, since that would disrupt the mailing address fields of the other non-inmate records that are stored in the same database. I don't really want to make another kind of address field, either, since that's getting redundant and ad-hoc. Any suggestions?

Hi, I'm working with a database full of inmates (and some non-inmates) and managing their records. I would like to devise a system where I can choose the prison in which inmates are located from a dropdown list, and then it would automatically fill their mailing address, since we occasionally correspond with them.

Conceptually, this is something that could be done by creating custom objects, right? If I had a class of object called prison, and then each prison had a mailing address, I think I should be able to autofill the mailing address of a prisoner if we relate them to a certain prison object. Is this correct, or no?

Or, is it something that can be done with a custom record type for a prison that would just have its name and address, and then declare some sort of relationship between a record type "prison" and a record type "inmate" so that it autofills their address if they are related to a prison?

I am worried about making their mailing address a lookup field, since that would disrupt the mailing address fields of the other non-inmate records that are stored in the same database. I don't really want to make another kind of address field, either, since that's getting redundant and ad-hoc. Any suggestions?