In an nutshell
For more than 30 years, this global nonprofit has progressively leveraged its technical expertise to help over 1.2 million NGOs, spread across 200 countries, increase their use of technology to create social impact. A key focus today is being a direct CSP for Microsoft’s nonprofit offerings, in which it helps customers understand their cloud-based options, select the best licenses, and use solutions effectively. The ability to deploy this program successfully required a time-saving platform capable of handling a diverse collection of global subsidiaries and partners. The interworks.cloud platform offered an ideal fit – going from decision stage to live in three months. The platform enabled the organization to create country-specific tenants, to automate ordering and provisioning, and to integrate the platform with existing solutions like Zendesk. 70% of customers are now licensed through self-service, saving time and money. Subscription support has been automated, and the costs of entry and ongoing customer support have significantly decreased.
This global nonprofit was founded in 1987 in San Francisco. The organization’s initial focus was to provide regional technical support and mentoring to other nonprofits and schools. Around 2001, the organization made the decision to broaden its reach and leverage its expertise to help the vast numbers of organizations beginning to better use technology to create social impact. Specifically, it wanted to ensure that nonprofit organizations had access to the knowledge and resources that could help them use mission-critical, high-tech resources in the same way as leading commercial players. By 2019, with a nonprofit workforce of about 250, the organization was serving over 200 countries and 1.2 million NGOs in locations as far as Colombia, Hong Kong, Kenya, and Poland. Today, a key part of their work as a direct CSP focuses on Microsoft’s nonprofit offerings. The organization provides its customers with end-to-end support in this area, enabling organizations to understand their technology options, select the licenses that best meet their needs and budget, and deploy and use their chosen solutions effectively.
To identify a global solution capable of serving multiple geographies and payment gateways
To offer clients self-service provisioning and management
To reduce transaction and billing costs
To ensure scalability, by selecting a solution that can grow as the organization grows
The organization is now the largest in its sector. While an impressive achievement, this “global pole position” brings serious challenges. With 24 country tenants, there was a need to identify a platform capable of supporting a diversity of subsidiaries and partners across the world. In addition, any solution would have to incorporate a wide range of languages and enable the seamless management of tenants from a single database. But, above all, there was a need to save time, by providing customers with a self-service portal – freeing its team to focus on vital high added-value activities instead.
After a careful market assessment, this tech nonprofit’s experts identified the interworks.cloud platform as the best fit to meet their specific, global — and ambitious — objectives. Things moved rapidly thereafter. The new platform went from the decision stage to live in the space of three months and has now successfully supported reselling of cloud solutions since early 2018. Full use has been made of the rich functionality, especially the ability to create country-specific tenants and automate ordering and provisioning. The interworks.cloud focus on integrations has been key. Using the platform’s built-in Zendesk connector to push tickets submitted via Marketplace to its established ticketing system. All tenants have created unique, customized marketplaces. Most are using the credit card payment functionality, which enables them to accept payments across a wide range of gateways, like Authorize.net, Stripe, and PayU. What’s more, the interworks.cloud platform’s multi-tenancy capability means that all these tenants can be managed effectively from the same place.
This global nonprofit has found interworks.cloud’s solution to be “flexible and collaborative.” Choosing it has enabled the organization to rapidly deploy new provisioning and billing capabilities across the world to serve over 150 countries and 10,000 customers. The platform has fully met the business challenge, with clear results:
The Global Nonprofit’s Director of Corporate Relationships
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