The National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) represents over 1,500 Community Health Center organizations, serving nearly 34 million patients every year across urban, rural, and frontier communities.
Their mission is critical: “to champion Community Health Centers (CHCs) delivering affordable, effective, comprehensive primary care that is community-driven and improves health for all.”
Their advocacy network is vast, comprising staff, board members, and patients receiving care at over 17,000 sites nationwide. But as their reach grew, inconsistent advocate data was slowing them down. Duplicate health center names, inconsistent entries, and reporting bottlenecks meant staff spent hours fixing lists instead of activating supporters. For an organization that supports both national and state-level campaigns in collaboration with Primary Care Associations (PCAs), this wasn’t just an administrative headache—it risked weakening their ability to mobilize quickly and credibly at scale.
In partnership with Quorum’s Professional Services team, NACHC reduced its organization records by 75% in under six months, eliminating duplicates and creating a clean, automated system that gives staff back hours each week to mobilize supporters and strengthen campaigns.
1. From Data Chaos to Clarity: NACHC’s Challenge
NACHC’s root data problem centered around how advocates identified their health center when signing up. A free-text form field meant the same organization could appear under dozens of variations—“Family First Health Center,” “FFHC,” “Family 1st Care”—leading to more than 6,000 custom organization records, many of them duplicates. This made it hard to:
- Attribute advocate actions to the correct health center
- Pull accurate, timely reports for leadership and PCA partners
- Segment audiences for targeted outreach
- Give advocates a seamless sign-up experience
“It was definitely a nightmare sometimes,” recalled Sarah Francois, NACHC’s Director of Grassroots Advocacy and Engagement. “I used to merge seven or eight duplicate orgs just to run a single report and new duplicates were being added every day.”
2. A Three-Step Data Transformation With Quorum
To solve this at scale, NACHC partnered with Quorum’s Professional Services teams for a multi-phase data overhaul. The process included:
Step 1: Intake Form Redesign
The team replaced the free-text “organization” field with a dropdown menu, preventing future inconsistencies by standardizing entries tied to verified health centers.
Step 2: Organization Cleanup Project
After exporting and auditing all records, Quorum presented two options:
- Bulk deletion (faster but risked data loss)
- Manual review and merging (preserved institutional history)
NACHC chose the manual route, meticulously consolidating more than 6,000 duplicate records down to a final list of ~1,600 active organizations.
Step 3: System Automation
Quorum built a scalable system with an automated background process that keeps organization data synced in real time, ensuring that when a new advocate registers or updates their affiliation, records remain accurate without manual intervention.
3. Inside the Results: What Changed for NACHC
Since implementation, NACHC has seen:
- Faster mobilization: Clean data and real-time automation mean staff can shift from data cleanup to activating supporters in minutes, not hours.
- 75% reduction in custom organizations: Dropped from 6,613 records to a clean list of ~1,600 verified health centers.
- Streamlined daily reporting: Reports that once took hours and required merging duplicates, now take minutes.
- More precise segmentation: Role-based dropdowns (e.g., patient, board member, CEO) allow for better targeting and tailored messaging.
- Seamless advocate experience: Advocates can now easily find and select their health center without guessing or entering inconsistent names.
- Stronger resilience to data errors: Even when new inconsistencies appear, the system auto-corrects and makes troubleshooting straightforward.
These outcomes were made possible by Quorum’s hands-on professional services support, which combined technical expertise with an understanding of NACHC’s advocacy goals. “This was a night-and-day shift,” said Michael King, Manager of Advocacy Communications and Engagement. “We went from advocates floating in a void to clear, structured data that supports tailored engagement.”
The impact goes beyond cleaner lists: with faster reporting and precise targeting, NACHC now spends more time mobilizing supporters and less time untangling spreadsheets—directly strengthening their advocacy reach and credibility.
4. Why Structured Data Powers Better Advocacy
With more accurate and structured data, NACHC can now confidently track campaign performance, recognize top-performing health centers, and tailor advocacy strategies across their ecosystem. Their Advocacy Center of Excellence program, which recognizes health centers for mobilizing supporters, now runs on a stable reporting foundation.
Crucially, this transformation wasn’t just technical—it was collaborative.
“The Quorum team met us where we were,” Michael shared. “They respected that we knew our data inside out but still made complex technical ideas digestible. We felt prioritized throughout.” Sarah agreed: “It took patience, but they really listened. They kept the ball moving and made sure we landed on a solution that works and scales.”
With a clean, scalable data model in place, NACHC is focused on expanding its advocacy impact by strengthening coordination with PCAs, reaching new supporter segments, and activating voices more quickly on policy priorities.
Takeaways for Your Team
Here are five lessons to help you future-proof your grassroots program:
- Standardize data at the source: Prevent chaos before it starts. Structured fields make it easier to report, segment, and scale.
- Eliminate duplicates: Dirty data wastes time and erodes trust. A clean org list means more accurate attribution and stronger insights.
- Preserve history: Fast fixes might break your reporting. Thoughtful cleanup protects institutional knowledge while improving accuracy.
- Automate wherever possible: Manual entry leads to errors. Automation ensures consistency and gives your team time back.
- Leverage expert partners: Professional services teams can translate advocacy challenges into tailored, scalable solutions that save time and amplify impact.