Teach For America
Teach For America leverages Salesforce, Maximizes Relationships to Expand Educational Opportunities
More than 16 million children in the United States are growing up in poverty and not receiving an excellent education. Teach For America, a nonprofit organization, recruits and develops a diverse corps of recent college graduates and professionals to help solve this problem by teaching in rural and urban communities and becoming life-long leaders in addressing the issues of poverty and educational inequity. Teach For America now fields a corps of 11,000 teachers and has an alumni network of more than 32,000, and 2,500 employees across 48 regions nationwide.
Given the collaborative nature of the work it takes to partner with districts, schools, other nonprofits, as well as their teachers, alumni, and staff, the organization depends on Salesforce to capture information, synthesize the dynamics of relationships, and communicate broadly to motivate and influence their vast network; as well as learn from their collaborative experiences and best practices.
“The more we can share, learn, and improve our outreach, the more proficient we’ll become at being efficient, coordinated, and move toward One Day when all children have access to an excellent education.” says Paul Chernick, Senior Managing Director of Business Analysis at Teach For America. “Across the 10 business units at Teach For America that use Salesforce, we’ve seen steady improvement with regard to case management for our on-line application, and alumni engagement.”
Now time is spent using new technology to solve problems as opposed to wrestling with old technology. For example, the Saleforce1 Mobile App lets recruiters easily connect with prospects in the field anytime and anywhere, eliminating lag time from the process.
“The analytics capabilities inside Salesforce are just completely unparalleled.” says Maddy Joseph, Manager, Recruitment Infrastructure, Teach For America. “People can click on a dashboard, refresh it immediately, and change data quickly. That’s really allowing people to maximize their efforts.”
Learning more through social media monitoring and data analysis
Teach For America’s social transformation isn’t just about listening inside the organization. They are also tapping social media to help drive the conversation about education in America today and to better engage with people across all of the communities they serve. “We’re also listening to what the public and education bloggers are saying about us,” says Josh Griggs, Chief Administrative Officer.
With the expansive social reach tools built into Salesforce products, Teach For America is able to assess social media efforts like never before to more deeply understand conversations in the education space as well as inspire connectedness across their community partners, teachers, alumni, students, and staff. By building community and encouraging others to get involved and support Teach For America and their community partners, they are able to maximize efforts to level the playing field and help provide more educational opportunities to more children.
“Education is the root of everything in this country,” says Lauren Sanders, Senior Managing Director of Digital Engagement, Teach For America. “It determines whether you get the right job. It determines how well you do in society. It determines how you relate to other people.
This is why we must all be working in coordination and collaboration to ensure that kids in low-income communities have access to the same high quality education as their more affluent peers.