Trigger to Create Primary Educational Institution Affiliation from Lead

[karamcintyre]

Current State: There is a lookup field on Lead called “Primary Institution” to allow a university to store an Educational Institution Account on Lead. This is useful for purchase lists. However, Affiliations can only be created for Contacts, and only one Affiliation can be created from an Interaction, so when a Lead is converted because of an Interaction, only the Affiliated Account indicated on that Interaction record will result in an Affiliation being created, and the Primary Institution field on Lead is ignored. A university could map the Primary Institution field on Lead to the Primary Educational Institution on Contact and leverage the HEDA trigger that creates an Affiliation from that Contact field, but additional fields and custom roles are not supported, and it could lead to multiple Educational Institution Affiliations checked as Primary.

Opportunity to expand: Create additional custom fields on Lead (Affiliation Role, Primary Affiliation checkbox, etc.) and a trigger that runs when a Lead is converted regardless of how it is converted that upserts an Affiliation on the Contact using the additional custom fields. This would allow custom fields to be supported, and the creation of non-primary Affiliations. Additional thought needs to be put into how to control the order the trigger runs when a Lead is converted because of an Interaction, and which Educational Institution Affiliation should “win” and be left as primary if the Lead and Interaction institutions do not match and both are checked as Primary.