Case Study: CommonLit achieves 4.9M+ users and scalable teacher–student engagement with Salesforce for Nonprofits

Small Nonprofit, Super-sized Reach and Program Engagement

CommonLit is a nonprofit that offers free online reading resources to help students from low-income schools build advanced literacy skills. Founded by Michelle Brown, the organization rapidly grew to 4.9 million registered teachers and students across 37,000 schools while operating with roughly 20 staff, creating the challenge of scaling personalized teacher engagement, increasing meaningful feedback rates, and efficiently managing complex partner and donor relationships.

By deploying Salesforce tools—Pardot Engagement Studio for automated, segmented email nudges, the Nonprofit Success Pack and Salesforce Inbox for relationship management, and dashboards for measurement—CommonLit now sends thousands of personalized messages daily without adding staff, increased teacher-provided feedback that improves student outcomes, and captures impact metrics to inform donors and partners; the organization is now building predictive analytics with Einstein to scale further toward its 20 million-student goal.

CommonLit

Michelle Brown

Founder