Challenge:
Coordinating volunteers, gathering photo and video information, and providing analytics around partner volunteer efforts for Unilever’s day of service.

Solution:
Unilever used Domo Everywhere to highlight partner engagement and the overall success of their initiative, and Domo Apps to collect and aggregate volunteer information and experiences across all participating partners.

Impact:
$25 million in goods and services donated to communities hit by COVID-19.

How Domo helped power Unilever’s United for America Initiative

With COVID-19 ravaging communities across the globe, Unilever, a multi-national consumer product goods company that produces food, beverages, cleaning agents, and beauty and personal care products, wanted to support the people and communities they serve. As a result, Unilever launched the United for America initiative in the US, which led to a National Day of Service in May of 2020. The program was such a success that they followed it up with another day of service in May of 2021. On those days, Unilever’s employees and 170 corporate partners worked together to support the communities that had been devastated by COVID-19 with more than $25 million in goods and services donated. More than 1,100 volunteers spent over 5,000 hours hard at work in food banks and delivered essential items like soap and shampoo to frontline workers.

In order to ensure that the United for America initiative was accurately tracking the campaign impact and coordinating key resources, including volunteers and products, Unilever turned to Domo for help. As CIO and Head UniOps Market Operations of Unilever North America, Alessandro Ventura explains, “With less than three months to launch, we turned to our technology partner Domo to help us quickly and easily bring together a data management system that would track donations, disbursements and projects during this initiative, and give our partners and team members the actionable insights we wanted to deliver.”

The partnership between Unilever and Domo produced an award-winning initiative that revealed the true power of harnessing data, in record time, to make the most of a philanthropic endeavor.

Intelligent Apps Supporting an Essential Campaign

One of the key reasons that Unilever sought Domo’s support in the United for America initiative was because of Domo’s capacity to bring intelligent apps together with its modern analytics and BI platform to develop a data and impact measurement solution for the campaign. This data management system, which utilized Domo Everywhere, was essential for generating multiple live data insights across the campaign website. Domo used its Public Embed to create public web pages for the 178 Unilever partners and Unilever employees to submit volunteer information. Each participating partner then had a unique partner portal which enabled them to login and easily review their employees’ volunteer efforts and share that information.

Domo Everywhere is about more than just sharing data; it involves building an ecosystem where partners can connect and centralize shared data, explore it together to gain valuable insights, and build joint solutions that create value for all.

As Alessandro Ventura explains, “As a Domo customer, we’ve seen the game-changing impact that immediate access to great data can have on teams and organizations…We believe that data-driven insights, visible to all involved will help us understand out impact. This partnership with Domo allows us to take full advantage of the platform’s real-time, 100% cloud-based capabilities to track the impact of the United for America program, providing the right insights that empower us… in supporting those in need.”

Channeling the Power of Volunteerism and Humanizing the Data

One of the key features of Unilever’s United for American initiative was encouraging employees and partners to go above and beyond to help communities affected by COVID-19 through volunteerism. This included thousands of people volunteering to support food banks and to distribute Unilever products to frontline workers and families upended by the pandemic.

The challenge was not finding employees willing to volunteer; the challenge was in coordinating and tracking their efforts. Thankfully, Domo’s experience with developing custom webforms using Form Builder and Form Viewer ingestion helped Unilever make the 2020 and 2021 days of service a success. Volunteers could easily log their hours, describe their projects, and even upload pictures and videos of themselves putting the United for America initiative in action because Domo deployed Form Builder and Form Viewer to make it simple and easy for volunteers to enter that data while working to help their communities.

The result was that 1,116 volunteers sprang into action to help donate 14 million units of product, which helped 246 different food banks through 178 different partners, which impacted 249 different metropolitan areas across the country. Although the numbers are impressive, the photos and videos that were submitted by Unilever employees and partners humanize the data to reveal that this initiative truly grew out of the mission of the company—to make sustainable living commonplace, even in the pandemic.

As the day of service spread to communities across the nation, so did the social media messaging. Domo was able to connect to Brandwatch, a social listening platform used to collect information from across different social channels, to capture social media posts related to the day of service. As volunteers and partners worked to make a difference in their communities, they used social media to help inspire others to join them. Brandwatch captured almost 40,000 social engagements emanating from almost 8,000 mentions with an estimated reach of almost 15 million people.

Taken together, Domo’s intelligent apps and real time connectors created a data ecosystem that helped coordinate, track, and assess the strength of the 2020 and 2021 United for America campaigns.

The initiative was so successful that it was awarded the Ventana Research’s Digital Leadership Award for Analytics. The award showcases the leadership and use of business applications or technology that contribute significantly to improved efficiency, productivity and performance. “The analytics supporting Unilever’s United for America program demonstrated the value of shared real-time insights getting resources to the places they were needed most,” said David Menninger, SVP and research director, Ventana Research.