Yerba Buena Community Benefit District replaced fragmented spreadsheets and a broken data environment with one connected platform that tracks every property, vacancy, and stakeholder relationship across the district, giving the place managers and place leaders on the ground the clarity to drive economic recovery.
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Yerba Buena Community Benefit District partnered with District360 to rebuild its Salesforce environment into a connected system of record. The goal was to unify property data, vacancy tracking, stakeholder management, and board reporting on one platform the team could actually maintain.
A clean data architecture that replaced years of orphaned objects and broken relationships. An automated newsletter form integration that eliminated manual contact entry. A vacancy tracking module designed for multi-address properties. A connected view of properties, tenants, assessments, and contacts across the district.
Property data went from unreliable spreadsheets to a trusted system of record. Manual contact entry from website forms was fully automated. The vacancy module became the foundation for economic recovery reporting to the city and board.
Yerba Buena Community Benefit District sits in the heart of downtown San Francisco, covering the blocks between Second and Fifth Streets, Market and Perry. It is the city’s cultural district, home to major arts institutions, hotels, restaurants, and public spaces. With a clean team, community guides, and bike patrol officers on the ground daily from 6am to 10pm, the district keeps the neighborhood welcoming for businesses, residents, and the 20+ million visitors who pass through each year.
Before District360, the district was already on Salesforce, but the system had deteriorated over time. The data architecture was cluttered with unused automations and broken object relationships. Property data was scattered across spreadsheets that were frequently out of date. Vacancy information, critical for a district focused on economic recovery, lived in a module that had been built for a different purpose and no longer reflected what the team needed.
Contact records were disorganized. Business information was incomplete. When the team needed to find out which properties had changed hands or which storefronts were vacant, getting there meant hunting through multiple disconnected sources. Board reporting depended on manually compiled numbers that were difficult to verify. Every hour spent reconciling data was an hour not spent on the work that actually mattered.
Today, Yerba Buena runs on a single connected platform where every property, every contact, and every vacancy is tracked in one place.
District360 did not patch what was already there. The Salesforce environment Yerba Buena Community Benefit District had inherited was layered with years of unused automations, orphaned objects, and property records that no longer reflected reality. Fixing individual issues would have addressed symptoms. The team needed a foundation it could trust.
The rebuild started with a full audit of every object, every automation, and every relationship in the system. What was broken was removed. What was worth keeping was restructured. Clean property, contact, and organization records were re-imported into an architecture built around the way the district actually thinks about its data, with properties at the center and owners, tenants, assessments, vacancies, and stakeholder relationships all connected to the same record.
Every property in the district is now a single record linked to its owner, its tenants, its assessment history, and its vacancy status. When the data operations lead looks up an address, the full picture is visible in one view. That changes the nature of every conversation the team has with the city, with property owners, and with the board, because the answer is in the system instead of scattered across spreadsheets someone last updated months ago.
The previous vacancy module had been built for a different purpose and no longer reflected what the team needed. District360 replaced it with a purpose-built system designed for the way the district actually tracks storefront and commercial space occupancy. Each vacancy is tied to its property record, which means the data automatically connects to the owner, tenant history, and assessment information already in the platform. The module supports multi-address properties, which is critical for a district with large mixed-use buildings. When the district reports to the city or the Office of Economic and Workforce Development on vacancy rates and economic recovery, the numbers come directly from the platform.
Board members, property owners, businesses, and community partners had been tracked across disconnected spreadsheets that were frequently incomplete. The rebuild moved all of it into a connected contact management layer where every stakeholder is linked to the properties, organizations, and interactions they are associated with. Group communications, board reporting, and relationship tracking now happen inside the same system that holds the property data, so the team is never working from a list that is out of sync with reality.
One of the first high-impact projects was connecting the district’s newsletter sign-up forms directly to Salesforce. Every time someone fills out the form, a contact record is created automatically with the correct record type and field mappings. The team no longer copies information by hand from website submissions into the CRM. For a district with limited staff, automating that one workflow returned hours of capacity each month.
One of the most important outcomes was not a feature but a person. The team’s data operations lead quickly became the organization’s data quality champion, identifying property discrepancies, conducting audits, uploading updated assessments, and driving adoption across the organization. District360 worked alongside the team to build deep proficiency in the platform, positioning one person as the system owner, internal trainer, and technical liaison for the long term. For a team this size, having one person who deeply understands the data and the platform changes everything.
Most place management teams are living across five different spreadsheets for the same question. One for properties, one for vacancies, one for contacts, one for board reporting, one for whatever the city is asking about this week. District360 replaces all of them with a single system of record, so every answer comes from the same source.
Start a conversationThe rebuild gave Yerba Buena Community Benefit District something it had never had. A platform where data is trusted. When the executive director asks about vacancy rates, the answer comes from the system, not a spreadsheet someone last updated three months ago. When the team prepares for a board meeting, the numbers are already in the platform, connected to the properties and contacts they describe.
The partnership also reshaped how the district thinks about its own capacity. With clean data and automated workflows handling what used to take hours, the team can focus on the work that actually requires human judgment, from economic development strategy and stakeholder relationships to the neighborhood programming that defines Yerba Buena as San Francisco’s cultural district.
The platform continues to evolve alongside the district’s priorities. The next phase will deepen property owner tracking, expand the vacancy module for multi-address properties, and introduce contact type rationalization across the system. The foundation is now strong enough to build on, and the team knows exactly what to build next.
The vacancy module was designed specifically for the way the district tracks storefront and commercial space occupancy across the district. Each vacancy is tied to a specific property record, which means the data automatically connects to the property owner, tenant history, and assessment information already in the system.
The module supports multi-address properties, which is critical for a district with large mixed-use buildings. When the district reports to the city or the Office of Economic and Workforce Development on vacancy rates and economic recovery, the numbers come directly from the platform rather than from manually maintained spreadsheets. The data is always current because it is updated as part of the team’s regular workflow, not as a separate reporting exercise.
Yerba Buena Community Benefit District is a good example of exactly that scenario. Bandwidth is limited, and every hour spent on manual data work is an hour not spent on district operations. District360 was designed with that constraint in mind.
The implementation focused on automating the workflows that consumed the most time, like contact entry from website forms, and cleaning up the data architecture so that maintaining the system requires less effort, not more. The team also invested in developing one power user, Tam Dang, who now owns the platform internally and trains others as needed. Having one person who deeply understands the system is more sustainable than distributing shallow knowledge across everyone.
A full rebuild moves in phases rather than one big cutover. For Yerba Buena, the first quarter was spent auditing the existing environment, aligning on what the team actually needed from the data, and clearing out years of unused automations and orphaned objects. The next phases layered in clean property, contact, and vacancy records, followed by the workflow automations and reporting views that the team relied on week to week.
On the team side, the real commitment is access and honesty. A weekly working session with someone who understands the day-to-day operations, plus clear answers to questions about how data is used, is usually enough. The goal is to leave the district with a system it can run and grow on its own, not a platform that depends on us to keep it moving.
Yes. One of the first high-impact projects for the district was connecting the website’s newsletter sign-up form directly to Salesforce. When someone fills out the form, a contact record is created automatically with the correct record type and field mappings. The team no longer copies information by hand from form submissions into the CRM.
The same approach works for membership forms, event registrations, and other web-based data collection. District360 also offers a full website design and development service through District360 WebSuite, where sites can be built with these integrations wired in from the start rather than retrofitted after the fact.