Digital Solutions Support Mission to Keep Children Safe

In its earliest days, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) served primarily as a call center that collected information about missing children.

Over the years, those efforts expanded to distributing information to as many people and places as possible, including publishing photos and details of missing children on milk cartons, posters and in mail fliers. Today, NCMEC reaches a global audience by disseminating critical information through a broad range of digital touchpoints across web, mobile and social media channels.

Adobe supports continued digital transformation at NCMEC by sharing expert advice and advanced digital technologies that touch everything NCMEC does, from age-progressing photos of missing children and forensic image analysis to training, education and prevention programs.

“We review more than 2 million images and videos of child sexual exploitation every month,” said Michelle DeLaune, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at NCMEC. “Adobe Creative Cloud apps play an essential role in helping us identify victims, determine their possible locations and ultimately provide law enforcement with information that can help them rescue a child from harm.”

Finding missing children or children at risk of exploitation means that NCMEC needs to treat almost all outbound messages as crisis communications. Reaching people quickly with accurate information across multiple channels is essential to achieving NCMEC’s mission.

Adobe Analytics, part of Adobe Analytics Cloud within Adobe Experience Cloud, delivers data that helps NCMEC understand how changes to the layout, visuals and content encourage engagement. Using this data, NCMEC made changes to the website that lowered bounce rates by 88% compared to the previous year. The organization also increased total website page views by 47% and traffic to the donation and fundraising pages during this period increased 218% in just three months. Ultimately, website engagement increases public awareness.

“We’ve helped to reunite hundreds of families because someone recognized age-progressed images we created using Adobe Photoshop,” DeLaune said. “Seeing those children reunited with their families years later reminds us why we will never give up on finding our missing children.”

This article is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent report, “Commercial Software Versus Open Software: Breaking Down What You Need to Know.” Download the full report here.