The Salesforce.com (News - Alert) Foundation is again making a difference by extending the technology that it has created to those organizations that can use it to benefit individuals and nonprofits throughout the nation.

 

This organization, focused on integrating philanthropy and business, has announced today that the Tides Center, a nonprofit that provides back-office services to more than 200 socially innovative projects across the country, has completely transformed its business using donated licenses of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.

 

As part of salesforce.com’s 1% Product Donation Program, the use of the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service by the Tides Center has allowed to organization to build a set of custom, Software-as-a-Service applications to improve services to its projects by streamlining processes, reducing redundancies, eliminating paperwork and minimizing data entry error.

CASA Customer Solutions, a Salesforce.com partner, helped with the design and implementation of the Force.com applications for the Tides Center.

"With projects across the country and around the globe, we operate with a unique set of business challenges; and, as a nonprofit, we have tight budgets and limited IT resources,” said Ellen Friedman, Executive Vice President of Tides, in a Monday statement.

“We wanted a way to drastically improve our services to our projects and create a replicable model for the nonprofit sector without investing in implementing and maintaining a bunch of software applications. Salesforce.com gave us exactly what we needed -- a cost-effective way to create a completely customized solution for our unique model."

The Tides Center relied on Force.com to design and deploy a custom portal for potential new projects to initiate, manage and submit applications. The portal is integrated directly with Salesforce CRM to provide staff with a complete view into the pipeline of new project applications in process or those that has been submitted for review.

With this insight, the Tides Center has the ability to manage the application review and tracking process more effectively, while also keeping applicants informed along the way.

This deployment also enabled the Tides Center to address vendor contract management. The organization sought to eliminate the myriad of e-mails, faxes and paper normally involved in managing vendor contracts for more than 200 projects.

Force.com allowed the Tides Center to create a fully automated workflow and approval mechanism that significantly streamlined contract approvals and kept all relevant contract information in a single, central location.

With full integration of Tides Center’s accounting system with the Force.com platform is expected to provide staff and projects with direct access to real-time financial information as well as more timely, accurate and customizable financial reports.

"Force.com has been a tremendous asset. We have been able to create our own applications, extend the value of our Salesforce CRM deployment, and easily add additional features from AppExchange that helped with our marketing efforts," said Tom Shaffer, Tides Center's CRM Program Director, in Monday’s statement.

"Looking to the future, we know we have the right platform in place to support our organization as our needs grow and change."

The Salesforce.com Foundation has effectively leveraged the Force.com offerings and provided integration for an organization that can ensure that the technology is used to benefit nonprofits that are working to improve their communities, their environment and to help their neighbors. It is this commitment to making a difference that ensures the Foundation’s leadership in setting an example for others to follow.