Achieving alignment in a complex world
The Unocal Foundation consolidated all their funding data and achieved consistency and automation in their grants management processes, while facilitating extensive and cohesive collaboration with each of their business units. Business alignment is a top priority for corporate giving programs, but it is often an elusive goal. For global organizations, the task becomes even more complex due to varied business practices and social issues in different parts of the world. Unocal Corporation, one of the world's leading independent natural gas and crude oil exploration and production companies, deployed MicroEdge solutions to support their global corporate responsibility vision and strategy.

With the real-time and historical reporting capabilities in GIFTS, we are now able to identify patterns in our giving. For example, we can now proactively evaluate the strategy that each particular business unit is pursuing. Often we see that these patterns align very closely with the Foundation's strategy, enabling us to get more involved and to collaborate more closely between our business units and the Unocal Foundation, so as to have a greater overall impact. —Laurie Regelbrugge, Foundation Manager

Through the construction of an intranet portal that connects employees with the latest giving program information, Unocal has more actively encouraged and recognized employees' generosity and community involvement. Additionally, the foundation has a central point of information on the full scope of CSR programs. With easier access to this information, Unocal communications and government relations staff can clearly communicate the positive results of their programs in their day-to-day operations.

Now our business units and support groups have a centralized source of information, and an effective means of communicating with and reporting to one another as a result. Communications and government relations staff have, for the first time, a dynamic, real-time view of analysis data to use in their daily work. —Kieran Murray, President of E-Philanthropy Solutions