Cicero Integration with Popular CRM Leads to Policy Wins
Based in California, Sacred Heart Community Service envisions a community united in ensuring everyone is free from poverty. They operate an array of poverty-alleviating programs including ones that develop local leadership to win policy campaigns centered around economic, racial, and social justice.
Savvier advocacy: From general email blasts to precise messaging
Before discovering Cicero, Sacred Heart matched their members to legislative districts by hand, a laborious process that involved printing reports and wading through voter files. Alternatively, they sometimes resorted to blasting general advocacy emails to their entire membership. In order to take their work to the next level, Sacred Heart needed to quickly match members to their legislative districts and communicate with tailored messaging.
Smart money to spend: Using Cicero’s CRM integration and adding custom targets
Sacred Heart relies on the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) to centralize information about the population they serve. Cicero is one of three address-verification providers integrated with NPSP, but it is the only one that enables users to match addresses to national, state, and local legislative districts. That made Cicero the clear choice for Sacred Heart because they prioritize local advocacy.
Sacred Heart soon discovered more benefits to working with Cicero — like our team of full-time researchers and GIS specialists who can affordably fulfill data expansion requests. As Data Systems Manager Jay Pecot described it: “Responsive customer service and being able to add county supervisor districts were big pluses for us. Our second greatest need after city-level address matching was for county-level matching, so that was smart money to spend.”
Another benefit of Cicero is that our API returns a wealth of data, including non-legislative boundaries like school districts. With a bit of custom coding, Jay created a school district field in Sacred Heart’s NPSP and populated it for all members.
Turning limited resources into policy wins
Sacred Heart is thrilled about using Cicero to support its members in engaging in policymaking. When the city council or county supervisors are considering housing policy, for example, Sacred Heart can now segment and activate members with highly relevant information. As Jay said:
“We can contact our members and say, ‘This is your elected representative and this is the policy they’re considering.’ In turn, our members can go to their representative and say, ‘I live in your district and I know you are looking very carefully at [this specific] affordable housing policy. This affects me directly and I need you to vote for this.’ Cicero has enabled us and our members to make the most of limited resources — whether in terms of dollars or time.”
Sacred Heart is also excited about the role school district data could play in efforts to increase funding for special education in low-income school districts in Santa Clara County. They imagine using the data to identify and engage parents who live in those districts. “We already have a group of parents thinking about this issue,” said Jay, “so knowing which school district a household lives in could give that effort a boost.”
How can we help you?
We love helping nonprofits like Sacred Heart achieve their objectives through access to our comprehensive database of elected officials and legislative districts. Our partnership with TechSoup makes 5,000 API credits available to 501(c)3s for only $30 every fiscal year. Use your credits to integrate our data into your Salesforce NPSP and to access even more data through the Cicero API. If you have questions at any point, reach out!
