A seamless Salesforce to Wagtail integration

Want to drive your public website with data stored and managed in your CRM?

Need that process to be automatic and seamless?

Does your CRM need to be the single source of truth for your data?

"Yes please" said Beckman Foundation, a US organisation that helps to support and fund amazing young scientists.

Beckman Foundation store lots of data in their Salesforce CRM (thousands of records including previous young scientists who’ve been awarded grants; details about their staff; their board of directors; the scientific advisory council).
They wanted Salesforce to remain ‘the single source of truth’. This means Salesforce always has the latest (most accurate) information about awards, positions, affiliations and awardees, etc.

Beckman Foundation wanted a new user focussed, super secure, highly flexible and sustainable website to showcase previous winners of the prestigious awards, and to encourage more young scientists to get involved and apply.

They wanted to be able to manage content via their new CMS but crucially they needed the new website to tightly integrate with Salesforce, so that data from Salesforce automatically synchronises with the website - creating and updating people and people listing pages.

We built the new site in Wagtail - which is a superb choice for integrating with Salesforce (for example Oxfam GB, Global Witness and the Youth Sports Trust).

A custom Salesforce Object was created that filtered and aggregated all the data needed for people, such as awardees, to have their own page on the website. We used Heroku Connect to automatically synchronise this Salesforce Object with a database available to Wagtail in its Heroku environment (Heroku is a hosting platform as a service (PaaS) we use for all our Wagtail projects).

We then used our Salesforce Importer app that automatically creates, updates or deletes the website pages based on the latest synchronised data. This also includes metadata from Salesforce which allows control over actions, for example when a new page should be published.

The main challenge was putting in place a robust data mapping definition between the Salesforce Object data and Wagtail page/taxonomy data. This was greatly helped by the Beckman Foundation team having strong skills in Salesforce Object management.

A secondary technical challenge was having the Salesforce Importer app import photos of the people from Salesforce into Wagtail’s image library (with automatic face-detection to crop photos into headshots for the website).

But we love a challenge!

Yes - the Salesforce Importer app we built is largely self-contained, so structurally it lends itself to being reusable in other projects that want auto-generated pages.

Wagtail and Salesforce are a very good fit - we’re doing more work in this space and working on a standard Wagtail-Salesforce plugin connector. More on this soon.