About
The Council of International Schools (CIS) is a global membership community shaping the future of international education. The CIS community includes more than 1,530 schools and universities, representing 122 countries.
CIS is focused on connecting ideas and cultures across the world, developing socially responsible leadership through international education. CIS uses Salesforce as its CRM and manages its portals in Salesforce Experience Cloud.
The Challenge
CIS hosts dozens of virtual and in-person events and workshops throughout the year for its membership community. They sought a new system to simplify event registration and enhance the user experience for their members while simplifying internal processes.
The primary objective was to integrate the event registration experience in Salesforce and the CIS member portals. CIS wanted a modern and easy-to-use platform to facilitate registration. They also desired a flexible solution that would work with existing financial systems. CIS’ previous event registration system was handled externally to Salesforce and, therefore, could not meet these long-term requirements.
The Solution
Fonteva Events was installed to manage CIS’ event registration from the member portals. Event registration information needed to be accessible to staff members and captured in Salesforce contacts and accounts. Members benefited from an integrated solution that allowed them to access and register for events seamlessly within the CIS member portal. This included purchasing tickets through CIS’ custom invoice process, which was handled via Certinia (formerly FinancialForce). All activities related to event registration needed to be part of Salesforce.
Zentso built custom automation to integrate Fonteva Events with Certinia, passing event-related ticket pricing and billing information to Certinia and retrieving VAT rates from Certinia to calculate and ensure Fonteva displayed the correct VAT price to members at checkout. CSS was customised on the Fonteva Event pages to ensure the text for VAT was labelled correctly in line with Netherlands tax law and formatted appropriately for members. As Certinia does not work with native Salesforce automation out of the box, another third-party consultancy was engaged by CIS to collaborate with Zentso on streamlining the automation on the Certinia side of the implementation, utilising standard Certinia Message Types.
The Fonteva and Certinia automation allowed members to select as many tickets as desired during Fonteva checkout and pay the correct VAT price depending on their location. It also benefited the CIS finance team members as the current VAT engine in Certinia was leveraged automatically. The existing automation for sending member invoices remained intact with minor customisation. The result meant members would register via Fonteva and receive an invoice from Certinia.
A second phase of this project arose when CIS discovered the need to set a default tax rate for events based in the Netherlands. This was simplified by adding a checkbox to the Fonteva Event record and updating the existing automation. This provides the CIS events team with the flexibility to bypass the programmed VAT rates set up in Certinia and gives them further control to ensure a default VAT rate is applied to events in the Netherlands. Custom metadata tables were used in the Salesforce back-end to input this rate. This future-proofs CIS as the tax rate can be updated easily, should it change in the future.
The Bottom Line
- Enhanced membership experience through integrating events into the existing member portal
- Improved visibility of event data integrated directly into the membership CRM system
- Fully integrated workflow leveraging the existing financial engine to handle VAT calculations configured with automation