What is the Household Account Model?

The Household Account model is the default account model for Nonprofit Success Pack, and the account model we strongly recommend.

Salesforce was originally designed as a "Business-to-Business" (B2B) application. In the traditional B2B scenario, companies track other companies they sell to (Accounts). Each Account has people associated with it (Contacts), as well as "deals" (Opportunities). How all of these things relate to and interact with each other in Salesforce is known as an account model.

For the typical nonprofit, the B2B scenario doesn't apply. Rather than companies and deals, nonprofits generally care about people, relationships, and donations. Enter the Household Account model. In the Household Account model, people (Contact records) are grouped together into households (Account records). And donations (Opportunity records) are associated with people and households.

The Household Account model supports many sophisticated features, including Contact management for Household members, and address management.

The Household Account model is the default account model for Nonprofit Success Pack, and the account model we strongly recommend.

Note The Household Account model also supports organization Accounts (for example, other businesses, nonprofits, and religious organizations.) We recommend that you include all of your Contacts as members of a Household Account, and show relationships to organization accounts using Affiliations. For more information, see Add and Manage Organization Accounts.

Nonprofit Success Pack supports two legacy account models. For more information, see Legacy Account Models.