Celebrating World Literacy Day

In honor of World Literacy Day, Salesforce.org is pleased to partner with nonprofits that are working to ensure everyone is equipped with the ability to read and write. Here are just a few that are leveraging Salesforce technology to facilitate this important work.

Children’s Literacy Initiative

Founded in 1988, Children’s Literacy Initiative (CLI) is a national nonprofit that provides educators with coaching and training in the most effective practices for early literacy instruction for prekindergarten through third grade. We are this year’s National Literacy Week winner of the Library of Congress’ David M. Rubenstein award. Our workshops and institutes build teachers’ understanding of literacy and the art and science of teaching children how to read and write. Through one-on-one coaching we focus on skills that improve over time and are not lost when administrations, buildings, or curricula change, and we provide the books and materials necessary to provide high-quality instruction. CLI helps create a sustainable, school-wide culture of literacy that introduces students to the joys of reading, writing, and life-long learning.

CLI offers a unique catalog of services, from one-on-one professional development to providing classrooms with high-quality children’s literature. CLI has tailored Salesforce’s data management abilities to accommodate its diverse tracking and reporting needs. CLI uses Salesforce to manage the costs of its services and resources, while also tracking its inventory of books and literacy materials, ensuring quick and efficient delivery to classrooms.

Salesforce also tracks services delivered and project completion, ensuring that schools, teachers and students are receiving CLI’s full scope of work. We host approximately three trainings a year for more than 380 schools. These trainings dive deeply into literacy best practices that transcend curriculums and build upon teachers’ knowledge of literacy content and pedagogy. CLI utilizes Salesforce’s event management system to invite and track training participants and facilitators. We are often asked to report on services delivered and project completion, both internally and to our school district partners nationwide. Salesforce’s reporting capabilities allow CLI to quickly pull common data requests, as well as create more intricate custom reports for clients and funders.

Lastly, CLI has begun to use Salesforce’s API to help us build smart digital tools that pull relevant school and teacher data in real-time for our professional developers in the field.

To learn more about CLI, visit www.cli.org.

Literacy Inc.

Literacy Inc.’s (LINC) mission is to engage families and community members to support young readers in 10 high-need neighborhoods across New York City. For over 20 years, LINC has worked in deep partnership with schools, libraries, and community organizations to ensure that children read well and enjoy reading by third grade. In 2016-17, we served 11,942 children and 4,822 parents, with over 60% of program participants receiving support from multiple areas of our of program model.

LINC increases opportunities for children to practice essential literacy skills and model positive reading behaviors. We demonstrate to parents how to create a literacy-rich home environment and engage with the school around their child’s literacy development. We work with schools to increase collaboration and communication with parents around curricular goals. And, we organize the community to grow and sustain a culture that supports reading achievement for all children.

LINC adopted Salesforce 4 years ago, and have customized it to allow us to track and analyze program and fundraising data. With 100 to 200 program events each month, we need a robust system for tracking registration, attendance, retention, circulation, and monitoring outcomes. Salesforce dashboards allow us to make this data accessible to our field and management staff, so that together we can ensure we are meeting community targets. Salesforce is essential to how we report our impact to stakeholders. We are continually improving our customization to allow us to do more detailed analysis. Our next big challenge is figuring out how to ‘household’ our parent/child participants, and track family outcomes over time.

For fundraising, LINC uses Salesforce to segment our donors, create customized communications, and grow relationships with corporations, foundation, and individual donors. Our team has set up many reports that help us track progress against annual fundraising goals. We will need to raise over $3.1 million in 2017-18 to support our ambitious program expansion and strategic plan.

LINC is honored to have Mary Fratto Rowe, SVP of the Customer Success Group, serve on our board of directors since March of 2017. We have also been lucky to have the invaluable pro-bono assistance of Steven Giangrasso, Senior Program Architect, over the past few months to help us create custom analytics for our program data.

To learn more about LINC visit, www.lincnyc.org.

Literacy Trust

Literacy Trust leverages what exists to create a more literate community. We envision a completely literate public; cities thriving in diversity where literacy is not segregated and all communities have the tools needed to see every child become a fluent, motivated reader. At Literacy Trust we #leverageliteracy to create change, city by city.

If you are a participant or purveyor of any modern literacy program, you care a lot about collecting, analyzing, storing, and communicating massive amounts of information about schools, teachers, and students. When Literacy Trust began, the type of data collected was input factors of the tutors we train and the students they reach. Information such as student enrollments, teacher characteristics, or education expenditures. Today, however, our Salesforce database has given us the ability to quickly see key indicators on the progress of our students and in turn enriched our responsiveness and connection to the schools we serve.

Thanks to Salesforce we can have timely and targeted conversations around student growth, goal setting to improve instructors’ teaching, as well as goal setting for school-wide achievement. Because our Salesforce provides data that’s immediately manageable, we’re able to anticipate questions or concerns and address issues swiftly. Without the data as our guide we would not have been able to transform over 600 non-teaching school staff members into skilled reading instructors. Without the help of Salesforce the 2,000 children we have served, who came to us as struggling readers, would not be the fluent, motivated, self-confident readers they are today. At Literacy Trust, we trust literacy to change the world.

Learn More about the Literacy Trust signature program Reading Rescue visit readingrescue.org.