Define American & OneTenth: Building a Unified, Scalable Platform to Power Storytelling and Social Change
Define American empowers diverse and nuanced storytelling about immigrant experiences across mediums and industries through research, partnerships, and storyteller engagement.
With programs spanning narrative strategy, partnerships, content creation, research, and community engagement, their teams rely on accurate, connected information to understand relationships, track engagement, and amplify their impact.
As the organization grew, so did the complexity of its data - spread across multiple systems, with different teams using different tools and no unified way to view supporters, partners, or program activity. Define American sought a scalable infrastructure that could bring their work together, strengthen collaboration, and support their next chapter of growth.
The Challenge: Disconnected Systems, Fragmented Information
Before partnering with OneTenth Consulting, Define American’s data lived across multiple platforms used by Programs, Communications, Development, and external engagement teams. Each team tracked constituents differently, making it difficult to answer essential questions such as:
Who are our partners, storytellers, and contributors?
How are people engaging across our programs and communications channels?
How do our events, campaigns, and digital outreach intersect?
Which relationships are deepening, and where do we have opportunities to grow?
Without a single source of truth, staff had limited ability to coordinate outreach, understand the full lifecycle of engagement, or report consistently across teams. The organization knew that to scale its mission and continue shaping national conversations, it needed a unified platform and a future-ready data model.
Our Approach: A Unified Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Foundation
OneTenth partnered with Define American to implement Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, Salesforce’s latest innovation to support social impact as the organization’s connected, scalable hub for constituent, engagement, and program data. Together, we designed a configuration that reflects the uniqueness of their work - storytelling, partnerships, and community engagement while keeping the system intuitive and sustainable for staff.
Core Functionality Implemented
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud (NPC). Configured as the central operational backbone for all teams.
Fundraising Module. Streamlined for donor management, acknowledgment, and revenue tracking.
Utilized Opportunities as “Engagements.” Tailored to track discrete interactions and cultivation cycles with partners, storytellers, organizations, and contributors in a way aligned to Define American’s programmatic needs.
Event & Speaker Tracking. Using the Activity object and Campaigns to log guest speakers, events, and external engagements across multiple teams.
This approach gave Define American a flexible but unified framework, ensuring each department has what they need while contributing to a shared organizational dataset.
Integrations Implemented
To ensure seamless data flow and eliminate manual processes, we implemented:
Cazoomi (SyncApps) integrations for Constant Contact and Eventbrite, supporting both Email Marketing and Event Management needs respectively.
Fundraise Up. Integrated for online fundraising, donation tracking, and conversion optimization.
Together, these integrations provide real-time synchronization of contacts, event attendance, donation activity, and communication engagement - giving Define American a 360-degree view of constituents.
Data Migration: Bringing the Past Into the Future
OneTenth migrated data from multiple external sources, ensuring that historical relationships, activities, and program engagement were preserved and standardized. This work provided staff with continuity, cleaner reporting, and confidence that Salesforce would become the system of record moving forward.
The Impact: A Single Source of Truth for Mission-Driven Storytelling
With Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud as their centralized platform, Define American now benefits from:
A Unified View Across Teams. Programs, Communications, Narrative Strategy, Partnerships, and Development now collaborate in one connected system.
Stronger Constituent and Partner Management. Staff can see a complete picture of engagement across storytelling initiatives, events, campaigns, outreach, fundraising, and more.
Scalable Infrastructure for Future Growth. The new system lays the groundwork for expanded operations, richer data collection, and deeper narrative-strategy insights.
Operational Efficiency. Automated integrations reduce manual work, provide real-time data, and free staff to focus on mission rather than data cleanup.
Better Reporting & Decision-Making. Dashboards and analytics now reflect organization-wide engagement, enabling leadership to understand impact with clarity and consistency.
In short: Define American can now tell the story behind their storytelling - with accurate, connected data that strengthens their movement.
Looking Ahead
Define American is exploring additional enhancements to continue scaling their work, including:
Deeper analytics around storytelling engagement and content impact
Web integrations to further track constituent engagement and metrics
Enhanced workflows for partner management
With a strong, future-proof foundation in place, the organization is well positioned to grow its narrative-change work and deepen its impact nationwide.
“Define American’s work is deeply personal to me. Their commitment to shifting narratives, elevating lived experience, and humanizing the conversation around immigration aligns closely with my own values and with OneTenth’s mission. At a time when stories shape policy, culture, and community more than ever, their work could not be more important. We are grateful for the opportunity to support an organization whose impact resonates far beyond the technology.” - Rubin Singh, CEO OneTenth Consulting
“We're grateful to OneTenth for their partnership and guidance in our journey to gain more visibility, consistency, and utility with our data to guide the work of building toward a future where immigrant belonging is common sense.” - Define American
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To learn more about Define American’s work, please visit defineamerican.com—and, if you’re moved to do so, please consider making a donation to support their continued storytelling and advocacy.