When Google Sheets can't hold 50 partner relationships
Desiree manages programs at The Power Project, a nonprofit running youth empowerment and human trafficking prevention trainings. At any given time, her team is actively reaching out to, partnering with, or tracking at least 50–60 community organizations across California and Illinois.
For a long time, those relationships lived in Google Sheets. Contact names, organization details, training stages, follow-up notes — all packed into rows and columns, with notes crammed into cells. It worked, until there was too much of it.
The problem wasn't the data volume. It was the structure. A spreadsheet can list partners, but it can't connect them to their training history. It can't show you a board of which partners are "in process" versus "completed." And it can't give each partner their own space for notes, contacts, and meeting history.
Desiree describes herself as "a big Notion person." But her team didn't have the time to learn Notion. She needed something that felt simple on the surface and could scale underneath. That's when she started building in xTiles.
Building a partner directory and training tracker in xTiles
Desiree exported her Google Sheets data as CSV and imported it into an xTiles collection. What had required constant maintenance in a spreadsheet became a structured database she could shape to her team's actual workflow.
She built two core collections:
- Partner Directory — every organization they contact or work with, with columns for organization name, contact info, city, state, and status
- Training Tracker — each training broken down by stage and month, linked to the partner record it belongs to
The relation between the two collections was the breakthrough. Instead of cross-referencing two separate spreadsheet tabs by hand, Desiree could open a partner record and immediately see all associated trainings — and vice versa.
The Power Project reports impact monthly — how many trainings were delivered, to which organizations, in which regions. By organizing the training tracker by month from the start, Desiree made monthly reporting a filter operation instead of a manual count.
Converting city and state fields from free text to select columns was a quick win that unlocked more. The team stopped typing "Illinois" twelve different ways. It also made grouping and filtering by state possible — which became the foundation for multi-region tracking.
When Desiree showed the system to her boss Meiko, the reaction was immediate: "This is perfect."
Why traditional CRMs don't fit nonprofit partner work
The Power Project had tried CRM tools before. None of them fit. The reason, as Meiko put it plainly:
"A lot of our CRMs have been focused more on like sales and we're not really a sales agency. It's been really helpful to have this be a little bit more customizable and not have to fit what it is that we're trying to do into a sales environment." Meiko Taylor, Director, The Power Project
Most CRMs are built around deal stages, pipeline value, and conversion rates. Those concepts don't translate to a nonprofit tracking whether a partner has completed a training, how many participants attended, or whether follow-up outreach is needed.
xTiles doesn't prescribe a structure. You define the columns, the relationships, and the views. For The Power Project, that meant a system that reflected their actual workflow — not a sales funnel they had to reverse-engineer.
- Custom columns — build fields that match what you actually track, not what a sales CRM assumes you need
- Flexible views — switch between table, board, and calendar without exporting to another tool
- Google Drive integration — link to your existing file storage for backup and document access
- Relation fields — connect partner records to training records without duplicating data
Tracking California and Illinois as separate projects
The Power Project operates in multiple states, and Desiree's system reflects that. Rather than combining all regions into one giant table, she built separate xTiles projects for California and Illinois — each with its own partner directory and training tracker, scoped to the reporting needs of that region.
Within each project, the table view gives a complete record. But for quick status checks — which partners are in process, which are completed, which need follow-up — the kanban board view by partner status is far more readable than scanning rows.
A nonprofit partner relationship has stages: initial contact, proposal sent, training scheduled, training delivered, impact reported. With a select column for partner status and a board view, Desiree can see at a glance which partners are in which stage — without scrolling through 60 rows.
For monthly reporting, she filters the training tracker by month, sees all trainings delivered, and pulls the numbers her leadership needs. No manual counting. No tab-switching. The data is already structured for the report.
Rolling the system out to the whole team
After seeing the system, Meiko identified the next step: get everyone off their separate tools. Some team members used Notion. Others wrote everything by hand. There was no shared place for tasks or daily coordination.
The plan: make xTiles that shared place — not just the partner tracking system, but the team's operational hub. Tasks created inside partner records flow automatically into xTiles Planner, where each team member sees their own view of what needs to happen and when.
Create tasks inside partner records
Open a partner item in the directory and create a task directly inside it — a follow-up call, a document to send, a training to schedule. The task stays attached to the partner record and appears in the assigned person's planner.
Assign tasks to specific team members
Assign a task to any team member. Each person sees their assigned tasks in their own planner view — no separate task app needed.
Track deadlines across all projects in one view
The planner collects tasks from all projects — partner directories, training trackers, individual work items — into one weekly view. Drag a task to a new day to reschedule; the deadline updates automatically.
Use a shared team space for joint access
Move projects into a shared team space so all members can access the partner directory and training tracker. Set view or edit permissions at the project level for each person.
For Desiree, who prefers writing notes by hand, xTiles offers a path that doesn't require abandoning that habit: take a photo of handwritten notes, upload to xTiles, and the AI transcribes them into searchable text. The handwriting stays; the information becomes findable.