Case Study

CUSTOMER

Established in 1984 in Alexandria, Va., the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children® (www.missingkids.com) helps prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation, finds missing children and assists victims of abduction and sexual exploitation along with 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/juvenile justice and healthcare professionals.
• Nationwide photo distribution program 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,” comprised of 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 distribute these posters and NCMEC’s newsletter quickly, NCMEC’s IT staff relies on email. However, this presented a continuous challenge.

“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.”

In summary, NCMEC identified the following areas they required assistance with:

• Assure delivery of email to its Poster Partners
• Reduce workload in maintaining whitelist and removing them from blacklists with ISPs
• Prevent email from being caught by spam filters

SOLUTION

In late 2006, Gelfound was introduced to 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 email. Through Goodmail’s current partnerships with AOL, Yahoo!, and other leading ISPs, Gelfound estimates that about one million messages per year will be CertifiedEmail.

“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.”

RESULTS

NCMEC has experienced the following benefits from their adoption of CertifiedEmail:

• Assured delivery of each and every email to its Poster Partners
• Email to its Poster Partners bypass content and spam filters
• Decreased administrator workload by reducing the hours spent working with ISPs to get on their whitelists by 20-30 percent
• Increased email delivery by .7 percent (from 5.96 to 6 million email)
• Email sent immediately, delivering flyers to Poster Partners more quickly increase the possibility of finding a missing child.

Download the NCMEC Case Study