National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Case Study

Customer	The National Center For Missing & Exploited Children
Industry	Non-Profit
Email type:	Newsletters
Service	CertifiedEmail

Customer

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (http://www.missingkids.com) helps prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation; finds missing children; and assists victims of abduction and sexual exploitation, their families, and the professionals who serve them. Some of the services offered by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) include:

• CyberTipline (www.cybertipline.com) to report incidences of child sexual exploitation
• Technical assistance and training for law-enforcement, criminal justice, juvenile justice, and healthcare professionals
• A nationwide program that distributes photos of missing children
• A toll-free national Hotline (1-800-THE-LOST/1-800-843-5678)

Challenge

 

Example NCMEC CertifiedEmail

Part of NCMEC’s success depends on its “Poster Partners” — individuals, companies, and organizations from around the world, who sign up to receive NCMEC’s posters of missing children to post in their specific locations. To quickly distribute these posters and NCMEC’s newsletter, NCMEC’s IT staff relies on email. However, this presented a continuous challenge for NCMEC.

“Before we were able to send out the posters, we had to contact Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and the other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to get on their spam ‘whitelist,” said Steven Gelfound, director of information technology. “Typically, mass email senders are blacklisted, and we needed to make sure our posters were delivered to our Poster Partners. Constantly having to contact each ISP became a tremendous hassle, because we were always starting over with new email administrators or new servers. Not only was this process too inefficient, but many of our emails would be blocked by spam filters and remain undelivered. We needed a way to ensure fast and reliable delivery.”

NCMEC identified the following needs related to their emails:

• To assure email delivery to its Poster Partners
• To reduce workload in maintaining whitelist and getting removed from blacklists by ISPs
• To prevent blocking by spam filters

Solution

In late 2006, Gelfound learned about Goodmail Systems and the company’s CertifedEmail™ email authentication technology. CertifiedEmail is the only system of its kind where messages are routed automatically to the inbox, bypassing spam filters and guaranteeing prompt delivery. “This not only saved time, because we no longer had to contact each ISP before every mass emailing, but it also allowed us to be 100 percent sure that our Poster Partners received our posters and newsletters,” said Gelfound.

In 2006, NCMEC sent a total of more than 2.1 million emails. Through Goodmail’s current partnerships with AOL, Yahoo!, and other leading ISPs, Gelfound estimates that about one million messages per year will be CertifiedEmail.

Results

“As a result of using CertifiedEmail, we receive fewer calls from our partners who have not received their posters or other email from us,” said Gelfound. “Also, all the spam issues ceased and stopped bounce-backs. About 20–30 percent of the workload for our email administrators (in terms of hours spent dealing with ISPs) is eliminated because we know that about one million of the yearly email we send are definitely delivered intact and in a timely fashion.”

By adopting CertifiedEmail, NCMEC experienced the following benefits and, more important, increased the probability of finding a missing child:

• Delivery increased .7 percent (from 5.96 to 6 million email)
• Content and spam filters bypassed en route to Poster Partners
• Blacklists avoided (at participating ISPs and mailbox providers)
• Administrator workload decreased 20–30 percent (by avoiding ISP whitelist requirements)
• Assured delivery to Poster Partners at participating ISPs and mailbox providers
• Immediate delivery to Poster Partners
• Links active and images rendered by default