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Announcing our Investment in Traction Rec

We are thrilled to announce our investment in Traction Rec, joining Salesforce Ventures in partnering with the company. Traction Rec is a leading recreation management software solution built to create meaningful and engaging connections between non-profit community centres and their members.

Non-profit management software enables users to expand outreach and optimize interactions with supporters and constituents, leading to greater outcomes in fulfilling their organization’s mission. While non-profits are not known for being the most nimble of organizations, those that can quickly adapt to today’s digital-only environment and find ways to digitally engage with their communities, will be best able to survive and thrive.

The market for community centre management in particular has grown crowded with solutions that are generally inflexible and cover only certain aspects of community centre management. Many such solutions offer a lacklustre user experience and often fall short of the expectations of today’s consumers, which can leave consumers with a negative impression of non-profit organizations. In search of a simpler way to facilitate their programs and support their members, many recreational centres resort to manual methods for organizational management, including relationship management and engagement. Such methods are inefficient and often costly as they involve significant human capital resources, which are both expensive and rare nowadays.

Traction Rec has built a cloud-based SaaS solution on the Salesforce platform, pairing a best-of-breed CRM platform with significant subject matter expertise and purpose-built tools for recreation centres. The platform provides organizations with a 360° view of their constituents for greater visibility of the roles and ways in which they engage with their community.

Traction Rec enables the collection of data all within one unified platform, enabling membership and program management, childcare management, facilities, retail and financial management, all accessible by both operations staff and community members.

With Traction Rec, organizations have seen savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual costs. Transitioning from manual processes to automated systems has led to drastic time savings for staff. But perhaps most importantly, Traction Rec has helped community centres and non-profits deliver on their missions with measurable impact, and at Pender Ventures, we have a keen eye for companies that efficiently transform capital into tangible value and impact.

Traction Rec is a spinout of Traction on Demand (acquired by Salesforce in 2022) and has a remarkable and diverse team of more than 50 individuals led by Lara Gilchrist, who previously ran product and customer enablement at Traction on Demand. By listening to customers and gaining a deep understanding of their pain points, Traction Rec has already demonstrated great value for over 50 community centres across North America, including YMCAs, Jewish Community Centres (JCCs) and Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCAs).

We heard amazing feedback from Traction Rec’s customers about why they love the product: “Traction Rec is transformative to our JCC”; “We implemented Traction Rec and there are no limitations – if we can dream it, we can do it””; and “Our program providers can focus more time on delivering programs, not entering data in our systems”. In our view, these comments validate how Traction Rec’s core value proposition resonates strongly with customers.

We look forward to being a valuable partner for Lara and the entire team at Traction Rec as the company continues to help non-profit community centres enable their teams and empower their community members.

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