Case Study: Goodwill doubles daily mission mentions and amplifies mission awareness with Talkwalker

How Goodwill Industries International keeps pace with social analytics

Goodwill Industries International, the nonprofit network that runs thousands of local stores and workforce development centers, faced a visibility problem: people knew Goodwill as a thrift store but not for its mission of job training and community services. With roughly 6,000 brand mentions a day but only about 100 mission-related mentions, GII also struggled with persistent viral misinformation and, during COVID-19, new crises like donation “dumping” and rapidly changing safety concerns that local teams couldn’t monitor alone.

Using Talkwalker’s AI-powered social listening, GII built refined Boolean queries, shareable dashboards, automated alerts, visual analytics and virality maps to amplify mission messaging, surface local issues, and warn of emerging rumors. The platform helped central teams distribute ready-to-use content to local Goodwills, speed crisis response, and measure impact: mission mentions are up 1,800% since 2018, daily mission mentions have doubled to about 200/day, mission-specific mentions rose 44% during the pandemic’s spring surge, and analytics freed time for strategy while improving early detection and mitigation of issues.

Goodwill

Adam Stiska

Director of Marketing and Digital