Action for Healthy Kids faced a common dilemma at the core of every nonprofit: how to gauge impact. Specifically, as a nonprofit mobilizing thousands of volunteers to catalyze change in schools across the nation, how could they know how many schools they were touching?

In Soapbox Engage and Salesforce.com, Action for Healthy Kids found their answer:

“We purchased a list of 130,000 schools across the country and uploaded it to Salesforce.com,” explained Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “We then directed users to our website where they could search for the school with which they are affiliated by utilizing the Soapbox Engage Salesforce search tool.”

When Action for Healthy Kids elected to build their new website with Soapbox Engage, they chose more than just a great looking, mobile-friendly website that was easy to manage and useful for event registrations. They adopted a powerful platform integrating with Salesforce.com in ways that have transformed core business processes.

“The process for applying for our grants has completely changed as a result of Engage,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “It was a painful, painful thing before. We’d have to send people to Survey Monkey and dowload responses in an Excel file.”

Action for Healthy Kids has chapters across the country. Each of these chapters has events for which they manage online reservations.

“In the past, we had the state chapters using their own event tools, like EventBrite. Sometimes those names would get into our system and sometimes they wouldn’t,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “For one of our bigger events, we would have hundreds of registrations. When you think about all of those Excel files that would need to be individually configured and sent to the data administrator for clean up and import...it has required hours and hours of time.”

Two weeks ago, we highlighted Global Fund for Women, a leader in advancing the rights of women and girls worldwide, and its efforts to mobilize supporters around the globe with Soapbox Petitions and Salesforce.

This campaign on behalf of survivors of rape in conflict areas such as eastern Congo and Syria garnered thousands of signatures in just days. As of this afternoon, more than 9,100 supporters have signed their petition.

What's more, the overwhelming percentage of these supporters are new to Global Fund for Women:

When Action for Healthy Kids chose to move from Convio Luminate to Soapbox Engage and the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Starter Pack, the money saved in recurring monthly fees was enough fund a full website redesign with change to spare. The redesign was far more than a facelift or color refresh. It facilitated a fundamental shift in the online marketing presence of the organization and connects with their audience in entirely new, more mission-focused ways.

“We weren’t mobile-friendly. That was an obvious need that aligned with our goal of making a more modern website,” said Anthony Moss, Web and Database Manager for Action for Healthy Kids. “We really wanted to speak to a consumer audience and make it more visual. We were very copy-heavy and we wanted to communicate through images rather than text.”

The desire to speak more effectively to a consumer audience was rooted in both the traditional strengths and perceived opportunities of the organization: