The challenge
Heritage of Pride (HOP), doing business as NYC Pride, plans and produces the official New York City LGBTQIA+ Pride Week events each June. As the organization transitioned from Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) to Nonprofit Cloud, it also needed to move from Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Classic to a Lightning-enabled MCAE instance to align with its new architecture and better support volunteer outreach.
Volunteer information was spread across legacy systems, making it difficult to build a unified view of each volunteer's history and preferences. The outdated MCAE Classic instance lacked modern functionality and could not integrate effectively with the new Lightning-based Nonprofit Cloud. Volunteer communications required significant manual effort, with no automated journey capabilities in place.
The team also lacked visibility into email performance, engagement rates and volunteer behavior, making it hard to optimize outreach. Third-party applications used for events and volunteer scheduling weren't connected to the core system, resulting in duplicated effort and data silos. On top of this, the Email Landing Page Lightning Builder features hadn't been activated, limiting the team's ability to design and deploy modern, responsive outreach materials.
The TELUS Digital solution
NYC Pride collaborated with TELUS Digital to implement and migrate MCAE to a modern, Lightning-enabled foundation built for its new Nonprofit Cloud architecture.
TELUS Digital connected Nonprofit Cloud and MCAE, enabling a unified view of volunteer engagement across programs. The team built automated, personalized volunteer communication journeys, and introduced engagement analytics to track open rates, clicks and volunteer interactions.
TELUS Digital also established a scalable communication framework to support future growth and more complex volunteer journeys without added overhead, and integrated key third-party tools used for events and volunteer scheduling. The team also enabled Lightning Builder giving NYC Pride a code-free platform for creating outreach content.
The results
By the end of the project, NYC Pride moved from a fragmented, manual volunteer outreach process to a connected, automated engagement platform that responds to volunteers faster and more consistently. The organization strengthened relationships with volunteers, streamlined coordination and gained visibility it didn't have before.
- Volunteer engagement is now personalized and automated through connected communication journeys
- Volunteer onboarding and coordination are streamlined through integrated third-party tools
- The team has real-time visibility into email performance and volunteer engagement behavior
- Outreach materials can be built in Lightning Builder without HTML or coding support
- The communication framework is built to scale with future volunteer growth and program complexity
