I couldn’t imagine putting the entire business processes of Tides Center on any other platform.
- -Julie Shaffer, Director of Software Solutions, Tides Center
The Force.com Platform Empowers Non-Profits
Tides, founded in 1976, is a national nonprofit that offers an array of services to help forward-thinking philanthropists, foundations, activists, and organizations effect positive social change. Tides consists of several components, each of which pursues a distinct yet related strategy to accomplish this goal. One such component, Tides Center, provides back-office services and support to hundreds of “start-up” and existing nonprofit projects around the country. Encompassing financials, grants, human resources, and payroll management, Tides Center’s services enable projects to focus on its programs and outcomes, instead of back-office administration.
In 2008, Tides Center will fully implement a suite of applications on the Force.com platform for all internal staff, as well as for Tides Center projects. Tides Center has already greatly improved the application and intake process for new projects utilizing Force.com and has recently deployed Force.com to remaining internal staff. The next phase is the deployment of Force.com for projects. Through the use of applications built on the Force.com platform, Tides Center is streamlining processes, reducing redundancies, eliminating paperwork, and minimizing data entry errors.
Full integration of Tides Center’s accounting system with the Force.com platform will give staff and projects direct access to real-time financial information as well as more timely, accurate, and customizable financial reports. The full deployment will enhance the projects’ visibility into the management of its resources. At the same time, the applications on the Force.com platform give Tides Center staff a centralized repository and increased visibility into communications, contracts, and governance checkpoints with projects, vastly improving support and service to them.
Why Force.com?
Julie Shaffer, the Director of Software Solutions for Tides Center, found that the Force.com platform was the perfect fit for the mission and needs of Tides Center. With the expertise and guidance of CASA Customer Solutions, a salesforce.com partner and a leader in delivering entire relationship management solutions for organizations, Tides Center was able to prove that the Force.com platform could handle its complex requirements without building an external custom solution.
The dramatically reduced development and deployment costs for the Force.com platform gave Shaffer the ability to implement systems using limited IT resources while still maintaining a solution to support the unique business processes of Tides Center.
The platform was also equipped to support both Tides Center internal staff and project access with one system. Force.com’s security and sharing functionality plays a critical role in partitioning information so that projects will only see their own information, and not that of other projects. This functionality, coupled with the growth of Force.com’s integration services, also supports the Tides plan to deploy the platform across other Tides components, creating a unified client services platform.
Last, but not least, salesforce.com has a long history of active support of non-profit organizations. Salesforce.com donates one percent of its licenses to non-profits, salesforce.com employees are expected to donate one percent of their paid time to charitable work, and one percent of salesforce.com's equity is given to the Salesforce Foundation.
All of these factors made the Force.com platform a perfect fit for Tides Center.
Implementing on the Force.com Platform
But Shaffer and her team still had to actually build out the applications for Tides Center.
In January 2007, the first Force.com implementation for Tides Center was released to the prospect development team. Now, the entire intake process of new projects is managed and maintained within Salesforce, giving greater visibility into the pipeline and streamlining the process to ensure consistency.
In February, the team turned its focus on beginning to define the scope of the next major implementation – launching Force.com for the rest of Tides Center’s staff and its myriad accompanying business processes by the end of the year.
The next four months involved the rigorous work of defining and documenting all Tides Center’s current business processes and mapping out future requirements with the support of the platform. In June 2007, the team began configuring and developing the platform to mirror these future processes. This phase was successfully deployed in December 2007, and the team is now focused on the project deployment phase.
The overall implementation of this software-as-a-service solution consists of many different applications and custom objects. CASA Customer Solutions created an effective custom portal for new projects to write, manage, and submit their applications. This portal integrates directly with the platform so staff can get a view into application pipeline, including those in the process of being written and newly submitted applications. The management of day-to-day project information, including tracking grants, contracts and the various project requests are all weaved into the platform.
The flexibility of the workflow engine, the integration tools and the ability to build out the database on the fly became the key elements to this successful implementation of Force.com for Tides Center.
The capabilities of the Force.com platform lived up to Ms. Shaffer’s already high expectations. Shaffer stated “I couldn’t imagine putting the entire business processes of Tides Center on any other platform."
Tides Center also uses four applications from the AppExchange marketplace, including Form Factory and Conga Mail Merge. “It was extremely easy to not only find specific applications to meet our needs, but to also blend in functionality with AppExchange offerings,” said Shaffer.
A Closer Look
A closer look at two of the applications and functions will help illustrate how Tides Center is able to streamline their operations with the Force.com platform.
One of the services Tides Center provides to its projects is to review, approve, and monitor their vendor contracts. Before the Force.com platform, the workflow for these processes was cumbersome, relying primarily on emails, faxes, and hard copies of the paperwork delivered to staff inboxes. Shaffer and her staff were able to use the built-in workflow and approval mechanisms to significantly streamline the processes for managing contract approvals. “Now staff can log into one place and view the current status of a contract, review specific information about the contract, and download the actual contract that is attached to the record,” said Shaffer.
The second example is illustrated through the integration of systems used by Tides Center to manage all of the project’s receivables and payables. Prior to the Force.com workplace, the process involved staff accessing two databases to pull up financial information about a specific project’s receivables and payables. With the Force.com platform, Tides Center is able to merge key financial information into objects within Salesforce on a daily basis. With this integration in place, staff gain instant visibility into the real-time financial health of each project and the ability to produce important financial reports without jumping from system to system.
This application also illustrates the flexibility of applications that run on Force.com to work with an existing set of systems. Through the support of Jitterbit, an AppExchange partner, outside databases were able to smoothly integrate with the Force.com applications built by Tides Center.
Tides Center was able to accomplish all of this without any in-house, heavy-duty programming staff. Most of the applications were created with native Force.com capabilities, although Shaffer utilized the experience of CASA Customer Solutions to help implement some Apex code procedures. “We’re not at the level of a Java or .Net developer, but we were still able to create an entire system with the Force.com platform,” says Shaffer.
Rollout
Tides Center began to roll out its Force.com platform to the rest of the staff in early December of 2007, with user training and the use of the Force.com Sandbox environment, which was an extremely helpful resource in supporting its training efforts. The next step was to bring 65 internal users onto the live system at the end of 2007.
The overall introduction of the Force.com applications has gone very well, according to Shaffer. “With careful planning and communication, the rollout has been very successful and everyone is excited to be using the new system. They see the possibilities that this new platform will provide them for reporting, workflow management, and overall data maintenance,” she said. Tides Center will be introducing the Force.com platform to their projects throughout 2008, with the potential of reaching 600 additional users.
Shortly before the beginning of the rollout, Shaffer was introduced to Salesforce Ideas, a tool for community sharing, and ended up including it with the overall Force.com rollout for Tides Center's internal staff. “It is a perfect opportunity to provide a place for staff to submit their ideas, vote on others, and receive feedback while they are new to the platform and when ideas typically flourish” said Shaffer.
Powering Social Change
For non-profits looking to make a positive impact on the world, two things are always in short supply – money, and the organizational skills to use the money effectively. Tides Center has committed to using the Force.com platform to improve services and impact for the projects and the community, while enabling quality and efficiency and inspiring innovation.
The Force.com platform and salesforce.com give Tides Center what it needs to create a waterfall effect for social good – helping its projects implement programs for positive social change.
Want to learn more?
The best way to get started is to follow the Force.com Quick Start steps.