Salesforce.com's 1% product donation program helps innovative nonprofit transform its organization to better serve others

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- The Salesforce.com Foundation, the global leader in integrating philanthropy and business, today announced that Tides Center, a sector-leading nonprofit that provides back-office services to over 200 socially innovative projects across the country, has completely transformed its business using donated and discounted licenses of Salesforce CRM and Force.com as part of salesforce.com's 1% Product Donation Program. Using the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service, Tides Center built 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. Salesforce.com partner CASA Customer Solutions helped design and deploy the Force.com applications for Tides Center.

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'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. 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,' said Ellen Friedman, Executive Vice President of Tides. 'Salesforce.com gave us exactly what we needed -- a cost-effective way to create a completely customized solution for our unique model.'

Tides Center used 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, so staff has a complete view into the pipeline of new project applications in process as well as those that have been submitted for review. This insight helps Tides Center manage the application review and tracking process more effectively, and also keep applicants informed along the way.

Vendor contract management was another area Tides Center addressed with its Force.com deployment. The organization wanted to eliminate the myriad of emails, faxes and paper involved in managing vendor contracts for over 200 projects.