Athletic coaches can have a profound influence on a child. A positive coaching experience can build character, good sportsmanship and a healthy sense of competition that can endure throughout a lifetime. Bad coaching can sow seeds of aggression, cheating and low self-esteem that can affect a young athlete into adulthood.
Yet many paid and volunteer coaches lack training on what makes a good coach in any sport—baseball, soccer, track, football, basketball and others. Equipping youth coaches with the knowledge and skills they need to help shape better athletes and better people is the mission of NetSuite.org grantee the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA), a national non-profit organization founded in 1998 at Stanford University.
Over the years, PCA has impacted more than 5 million youth athletes by training coaches, parents and other leaders with in-person and online workshops, partner programs, books, newsletters and other resources. In partnership with more than 1,700 schools and youth organizations throughout the U.S., PCA has been instrumental in providing young athletes with a character-building sport experience.
But PCA itself lacked the tools it needed to maximize its impact. The organization (www.positivecoach.org) lost efficiency in its use of QuickBooks, Excel and a custom-built website to sell services, capture donations and manage its finances. Searching for an alternative, PCA got in touch with the NetSuite.org corporate citizenship team, which offers free and discounted software to qualified charities and social enterprises along with pro bono services from NetSuite employees.
A Better Focus on the Core Mission
Selected after an evaluation against Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains), Financial Edge and Sage, NetSuite has given PCA a seamless cloud solution to eliminate manual work and channel resources into its valuable programs. For instance, daily transactions that used to take three hours a day to process are fully automated in NetSuite.
And with NetSuite SuiteCommerce replacing the previous homegrown webstore, PCA has an interactive ecommerce storefront to sell services and accept donations, with revenue automatically updated in back-end financials. Since going live on NetSuite in 2009, PCA has realized steady double-digit year-over-year revenue growth.
“The integration between our SuiteCommerce storefront and NetSuite is great because we can make changes to our webstore very quickly,” said Judy Dillenbeck, PCA Senior Accountant. “NetSuite gives us a lot more transparency into our information. There’s no way we could do as much or be as successful in reaching youth with our previous system.”
NetSuite also supports PCA’s growing footprint across the U.S, providing personnel at PCA headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., and in nine regional offices (with one more to open soon) with real-time visibility and management on a centralized cloud platform that can be accessed from anywhere. PCA is making the most of its partnership with NetSuite.org by taking advantage of the SuiteVolunteers program, with two NetSuite employees doing pro bono work to implement custom scripts for income allocations.
As The New York Times reported, PCA is helping young athletes mature into “major league people.” At NetSuite.org, we’re gratified to be a part of PCA’s success.
For more information on NetSuite.org’s programs, find us @NetSuiteOrg.