CRMs, or Customer Relationship Management databases, are a type of database used by businesses and other organizations to track communication touchpoints, sales funnels, charitable giving, and more. A business might track its sales and potential sales, and a nonprofit org might track its donors and programmatic activities.
CRMs have a particular architecture, or what we might call a data model. Most share the same general type of model, sometimes called the relational model, and most use the same general language to describe that model.
So that we can understand how these databases work, and use the same language when talking about their many functions, it's useful to review the basics and learn a handful of technical terms. Thinking through the relational model through these terms is a great way to build your intuition of how a database works.
I created this post because in my work I frequently explain these terms, and though they're very basic and fundamental to CRMs and relational databases generally, I hadn’t seen a user-friendly summary elsewhere.
By the end of this post, we’re going to learn the meanings of five terms and how they relate to each other: object, record, record ID, field, and value. If you get confused by anything, don’t be discouraged—finish reading the whole post and see if it clicks by the end, or with an additional read-through. Context can be really helpful!
Overview and spreadsheet analogy
Let’s start by thinking about a table of data in a spreadsheet. It’s worth noting that the analogy won’t hold for just any kind of data you have in a spreadsheet — the data has to be structured a certain way. Spend some time thinking through the below example of pop stars who have made contributions to our hypothetical nonprofit. If you work at a for profit company, pretend these are your customers (maybe they are!).
Breakdown of terms
Now, let’s dig deeper into these terms, and add one more, the Record ID.
Objects
The object is the basic building block of a database. It represents a type or category of thing. Examples of objects for a nonprofit CRM might include: Contacts (people), Accounts (organizations), Contributions (donations), and Events. Examples of objects for a CRM used by a for-profit company might include: Contacts (people), Accounts (businesses), Opportunities (potential and actual sales), and Leads (potential customers). What makes a database powerful is that objects can be connected to each other through relationships. For example one contact may be connected to many contributions, and one contribution is always connected to a contact.
Record
A record is a specific instance of a particular object. For example, Rihanna is a particular record of the Contact object.
Record ID
Records have unique identifiers called Record IDs. These might be numbers, like 100024319 or 334405, or a jumble of characters, like 0035e00000A5vlQ. It's a unique identifier because only one record ID corresponds to one record. In the CRM EveryAction, record IDs for contacts have a special name, called a VANID. Record IDs are used because names don't always uniquely identify a thing — we might have two contact records, both named "Jane Smith", which refer to different people and different records.
Field and Value
A field is a particular parameter or attribute of an object. For example, Name, Email or Total Contributions are all fields on the Contact object (they are all attributes of people). Fields can accept certain types of data (for example, only numbers, or only text). Fields might be updated manually by users, calculated automatically by the database, or modified by both users and the database. Fields might be required (they have to be entered for the record to be stored) or optional (they might have values or might not).
A value is hard to describe abstractly, but it's the particular instance of a field for a particular record, like how rihanna@protonmail.com is the value for the Email field on the Rihanna record of the Contact object. If this doesn't make sense, refer back to the spreadsheet diagram above.