Anti-Defamation League

ADL is a leading anti-hate organization. Founded in 1913 in response to an escalating climate of anti-Semitism and bigotry, its timeless mission is to protect the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment for all. Today, ADL continues to fight all forms of hate with the same vigor and passion. ADL is the first call when acts of anti-Semitism occur. A global leader in exposing extremism, delivering anti-bias education and fighting hate online, ADL’s ultimate goal is a world in which no group or individual suffers from bias, discrimination or hate.

The Need for a United Platform

Headquartered in New York, ADL has 25 regional offices supporting the organization’s mission with locally focused programs, campaigns, and outreach- all working towards the same mission. Previously, disjointed lists and technology platforms made consistency and coordination in marketing and fundraising a challenge. Moreover, legacy technology that couldn’t integrate across platforms stymied efforts to consolidate the organization’s program work. ADL recognized they needed a single platform that would enable centralized and accessible data management, as well as optimize the donor experience to strengthen ADL’s funding base.

ADL found their ideal single-platform solution in Salesforce; leveraging the broad spectrum of tools within Nonprofit Cloud to unite the organization’s regional work and strengthen the organization’s marketing, fundraising, program management and policy efforts. Since implementation, the consolidation of ADL’s data and information systems has been tremendous: staff converted roughly 14 million records from the old systems and retired 478 regional data sources. With all of ADL’s data now centralized on Salesforce, the organization is working towards a true 360-degree view of its constituents and efforts.

Leveraging Salesforce Integration to Maximize the Donor Experience

With one hundred percent of ADL’s programs being funded by a diverse donor base of individuals, corporate partners, and foundations, fundraising is critical to the organization. To support donor engagement, ADL manages a wide variety of events and campaigns throughout the year – including galas, executive discussions, and targeted campaigns around holidays and anniversaries of major incidents. ADL wanted the donor experience to be as personalized as possible. To accomplish this, the organization needed a better view of each donor’s engagement with the organization alongside tools to customize and manage outreach and fundraising.

ADL selected a combination of the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), Marketing Cloud and Classy (an AppExchange solution) for its event management, campaigns, and online donations. With the ability to easily integrate with Salesforce, Classy automatically populates all of a donor’s giving history, regardless of donor channels, onto NPSP. Staff then leverage Marketing Cloud to customize donor communications based on their newfound 360 view of donors’ interests or giving levels, including a journey designed for new donors. With this full history of engagement, staff can customize outreach and strategies to elevate financial support. “NPSP and Marketing Cloud allow us to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated needs of our donors, allowing us to track their specific interests within the organization and tailor solicitations for maximum impact,” remarks Carol Goldstein, Senior Director of Marketing.

A Marked Improvement in Fundraising and Donor Management

Fundraising success around campaigns has skyrocketed, with the latest set of campaigns drawing in over $5 million in online gifts. In the week following last October’s Pittsburgh tragedy, online giving to ADL jumped 2,000 percent. At the end of the year, the organization’s Giving Tuesday campaign experienced an increase of nearly 160 percent over 2017, with ADL experiencing its fourth-largest online fundraising day since 2016. Of the approximately 5,000 nonprofits using the Classy donation platform, ADL brought in the sixth-highest Giving Tuesday total – a promising indication that ADL’s message is resonating amid the welter of nonprofit end of year giving options. Moving everything onto one platform has also helped keep track of staff involved in donor stewardship, reducing duplication efforts and allowing for faster outreach, follow-up and closing on gifts.

Getting Everyone on the Same Page with Marketing Cloud

With Marketing Cloud, ADL has been able to gain a deeper understanding and reach of its audience. Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio keeps ADL abreast of social media conversations related to the organization’s mission and programs. Staff can track keywords or phrases in social media and automate appropriate responses. Marketing Cloud also offers results-driven metrics – including the ability to track clicks down to specific links – helping staff learn from and improve email communications. ADL has sent over 15 million emails since introducing Marketing Cloud. With email tracking and response metrics in conjunction with Return Path, ADL ensures these emails reach their recipients, with the organization’s deliverability rate above 95 percent.

The move has also enabled ADL to provide more cohesive messaging, by designing, distributing and training on email templates that allow regional offices to import custom lists and tools. For example, if regional offices send out local messages, the staff at headquarters can suppress regional distribution lists on their own outgoing emails to avoid duplication of communications.

Tracking Hate in a Social World with Service Cloud

ADL’s ability to track and tell the story of what is happening with hate incidents across the U.S. is critical to the organization being able to inform policies and programs and advocate on behalf of change. Previously, ADL relied on staff to individually monitor and report on relevant hate incidents and conversations discovered via media channels, alongside incidents reported via phone and local community members. . Reporting was uneven across offices and depended on staffing levels.

In 2017, ADL transformed its ability to manage these incidents by building an Incident Reporting System (the system) on NPSP and Service Cloud. The system captures information from individuals in communities who have experienced or witnessed a hate crime or incident and want it addressed. It then automates the creation of incoming case reports and routes information to staff. After a case review, the assigned case owner at ADL can determine the best course of action, coordinate with any internal resources or staff members, and provide an update to the person who first reported the incident, all through automation tools provided by Service Cloud. ADL is also able to import social media insights into the system via Social Studio, providing an all-encompassing view of relevant activity happening around the nation.

Since the introduction of Service Cloud, ADL has seen a 61 percent improvement in employees’ ability to manage incidents. Program staff have been able to develop service standards for responding to incidents thanks to the shared repository and dashboards. Data from the system is also used to build an incident H.E.A.T. (Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terrorism) map for the entire country – the first of its kind, interactive and customizable map. “By being able to drill into reports of incidents across the U.S. at the state and local level, we can identify hot spots and trends and make sure we are providing the necessary resources.” George Selim, Senior Vice President of Programs says.

Advancing Impact with Salesforce

By centralizing the organization’s data, ADL has increased its capabilities of capturing information and reporting on impact. Prior to Salesforce, reporting was distributed weekly due to the manual and customized effort involved. Staff now have real time reports accessible at their fingertips with dashboards making it easy to share information in a visually striking and digestible manner across all offices.

Salesforce’s easy integration with external apps is allowing ADL to draw in the right resources to support the organization’s needs. For example, ADL uses CQ Engage through the AppExchange to sync supporters, petition signers, and government officials in the organization’s advocacy work. Integrated with Salesforce, CQ Engage has saved ADL over 100 hours of data input and processing across their campaigns.

Leadership at the organization recognizes the impact that Salesforce has had on transforming the organization’s work. According to Raf Portnoy, Senior Vice President of Technology, “With Salesforce, we no longer talk about technology problems, we’re able to focus on the real-world problems we are trying to solve. We’ve made a huge leap forward.” With technology hurdles in the rear view mirror, ADL can focus squarely on getting resources to where they are needed most to advance impact in the fight against hate and anti-Semitism.

ADL worked with implementation partner Attain Partners.

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