As the executive director of the San Diego Futures Foundation, a non-profit agency that distributes thousands of low-cost and no-cost computers to underserved individuals and service agencies in San Diego County, Jeff Hancock appreciates the value and benefits that technology delivers.
Since 1999, the San Diego Futures Foundation has provided more than 33,000 computers to low-income individuals, schools and other non-profits to help bridge the “digital divide” and make it possible for more people to connect to the Internet for education, resources, sharing and more. The agency also provides training, education and technical services to its constituents.
But until early 2010, the San Diego Futures Foundation faced a digital divide of its own. The agency’s reliance on a patchwork of standalone business applications, including QuickBooks and Salesforce.com, limited its business efficiency, visibility and ability to further grow to serve more needy individuals and agencies.
According to Hancock, the siloed systems forced agency staff to spend countless hours collecting, moving and managing data among applications, while management found it difficult to track such basics as staff time committed to individual projects. That changed in early 2010, when the San Diego Futures Foundation worked with the NetSuite.org corporate citizenship program to implement NetSuite after evaluating the solution against QuickBooks Enterprise and Sage.
As an integrated cloud business solution, NetSuite has enabled the San Diego Futures Foundation to exponentially increase its business efficiency. For instance, the agency has reduced from eight hours to 30 minutes the time required to allocate staff invoices to individual projects. Time spent on timesheet processing has been slashed four-fold, and the agency eliminated a $50,000 annual expense previously committed to a payroll outsourcer.
“NetSuite has streamlined our business so that all of our contact records and transactions are in one place versus several places,” Hancock said. “With NetSuite, we are on a professionally developed, integrated platform that provides us with the crucial elements we need today, is flexible enough to be customized for specific things we need, and is backed by a company with heritage and understanding about the ERP market and customer needs.”
Moreover, NetSuite “vastly improved our capacity for growth,” Hancock said. Since going live on NetSuite, the San Diego Futures Foundation has grown from 14 to 36 employees and $2.5 million to $4.5 million in annual revenue.
As a non-profit leader, Hancock especially appreciates the role that the NetSuite.org program plays in helping his and other non-profits better fulfill their service missions. “Every mid-sized non-profit should be looking at NetSuite,” Hancock said.
As the cornerstone of our Corporate Citizenship efforts, NetSuite.org provides donations and discounts of the NetSuite system to non-profits and social enterprises. In addition, we work with partners to create social solutions, such as grant managementpro bono and traditional volunteer efforts.