About Customer
This nationally recognized nonprofit organization champions transparent governance, election integrity, and ethical political systems. With a mission rooted in ensuring every voice is heard and every vote counts, the group advocates for structural reforms to eliminate political corruption, protect voting rights, and strengthen civic participation. The organization is powered by grassroots supporters and philanthropic donors and collaborates across ideological lines to drive real change in U.S. democracy.
They are also committed to modeling best practices internally, striving for operational transparency, fiscal responsibility, and compliance with the highest standards of accountability.
Challenges
As the organization expanded its advocacy efforts and grew its donor base, it quickly outpaced the capabilities of its traditional contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool. Managing a wide array of grant agreements, employment contracts, vendor relationships, and compliance documentation required a more adaptive, automated, and secure solution.
Key issues included:
- Difficulty coordinating between legal, HR, and finance departments;
- Limited visibility into contract renewal timelines and obligations;
- Time-consuming manual audits and data tracking;
- Inadequate integration between contracts and budget tracking systems.
The Solution
The nonprofit turned to Zeal to modernize its contract operations. Zeal’s full-featured CLM platform, supported by expert legal ops guidance, offered exactly what was needed: automation, transparency, and control.
Key implementation features included:
- Seamless integration of contract metadata with the organization’s accounting systems, making grant and operational audits significantly more efficient;
- Linkage of workforce reporting tools with employment and consulting agreements to ensure labor budgets remained accurate and up to date;
- Automated alerts and monitoring for vendor agreements, helping teams proactively manage renewal windows and eliminate unnecessary spend due to missed cancellation deadlines.
Outcomes
After implementing Zeal, the nonprofit experienced measurable improvements in operational efficiency and compliance. These included:
- Improved Audit Readiness: Contractual data was synced in real-time with financial reporting tools, making audits faster, cleaner, and less resource-intensive.
- Budget Visibility: Leadership gained greater visibility into employment-related obligations, ensuring more accurate and strategic staffing decisions.
- Renewal Control: Automation features enabled early intervention before auto-renewal clauses took effect, eliminating unnecessary vendor spend and increasing contract accountability.
- Cross-Team Collaboration: With a centralized platform, the legal, finance, and operations teams could access the same up-to-date information, reducing email back-and-forth and version confusion.
