About GO Public Schools

GO Public Schools is committed to building and supporting a multi-city network of local coalitions, whose members — parents, educators, and community allies — work together to expand access to quality education in California’s most historically under-served communities.

The Problem

GO Public Schools works with many audiences to achieve its mission: teachers, administrators, parents, policy experts, elected officials, and candidates. Engaging supporters in each of these audiences is critical to GO’s continued success, but the GO team has limited organizing resources and they needed better tools for targeting and analysis. The GO team was able to tag contacts in their Salesforce database to identify which audience group a supporter belonged to, but they lacked other tools to measure the engagement of each of their contacts, and couldn’t measure the impact of their engagement efforts across the board.

The Solution

Enter StepUp. StepUp is Percolator’s Salesforce app for tracking and managing supporter engagement. StepUp has opened a new world of possibilities for the GO team in how they target communications and outreach, as well as analyze campaigns and programs.

Some examples of how the GO team is using StepUp:

• StepUp’s engagement levels are a key tool for their outreach and communications departments, allowing them to focus their time effectively:
  • For electoral outreach, they create recruitment lists of everyone at their “GO Participants” level (level 2) or higher. This helps them narrow thousands of contacts into a much more manageable group for outreach, increasing staff efficiency for turning out volunteers.
  • Teacher happy hour – they invite their most engaged teachers, all contacts labeled “teachers” at their “GO Actives” (level 3) or above, which has led to better efficiency and higher turnout percentages.
• They track which teachers have dropped engagement level in the last 60 days, and make an outreach list based on issue alignment. This tracking recently led to a re-engagement campaign: the GO team invited educators who hadn’t been involved in GO program work in over a year to a special event, and successfully re-engaged a significant percentage of their fallow teacher audience.
• Their field team regularly reviews which people have jumped an engagement level, and determine if there should be some special outreach touch.
• They review email data and analyze how email behavior overlaps with engagement level and engagement movement – particularly with specific email lists. Folks who opt into their “Board Watch” or “Budget List” are known to have certain attributes: positional power, policy interest, expertise, etc. They have self-identified as an important audience member, and the GO team regularly reviews this list and their engagement levels to determine if there are good opportunities to engage a low-engagement-level contact that has significant positional power or expertise. Is the GO team giving them opportunities to engage? Are there influencers or decision makers on the list who should be more involved in GO’s work? They also use this information to strategically re-forward emails to make a connection and invite people to particular board meetings they might be interested in.
• On the fundraising side, the GO team uses engagement level to better understand which donors they should be reaching out to for gift upgrades or additional gifts. Using engagement levels and metrics has greatly improved their targeting and helps them be more efficient and effective with personal cultivation efforts.
• The GO team continues to find new uses for StepUp for engagement targeting and tracking, planning, and evaluation and have truly put supporter engagement at the center of their work to improve public schools for every student in California.