Agentforce helps Big Brothers Big Sisters of America change more lives.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA) is a nonprofit organization that matches adult volunteers with children, creating one-on-one mentoring relationships that help kids achieve their full potential.

The right mentor can change a life forever, and 30,000 kids are waiting for theirs.

Since 1904, BBBSA has been dedicated to creating life-changing connections, matching over 60,000 adult mentors (“Bigs”) and children (“Littles”) every year across more than 5,000 communities. 

“Mentorship is a powerful catalyst for breaking cycles of poverty and creating lasting socioeconomic change,” said Artis Stevens, BBBSA’s CEO. “The data clearly shows that connecting young people with caring mentors doesn't just transform individual lives; it's one of the most cost-effective investments we can make in our country's future.”

Research shows the impact is profound: Littles in the program are 20% more likely to enroll in college, 46% less likely to start using drugs, and earn 15% more in their lifetime. But with an average of 30,000 Littles waiting to be matched nationwide — some for as long as 3–4 years — BBBSA knew it was crucial to help their matching specialists make the right matches faster.

But to move faster, BBBSA won’t compromise match quality — something its matching specialists strive toward daily. They carefully assess alignment across factors like geography, background, interests, and long-term goals to give each match the best chance of success. All application details, interview notes, and contact records are stored in Matchforce, BBBSA’s custom match management platform built on Sales Cloud. Backed by decades of research and best practices, BBBSA’s approach is proven to make strong, lasting matches. 

Even with Matchforce streamlining their process, their data-driven approach takes a lot of time. “Part of the problem is it takes a human to go through all that information and find the perfect pairing between a Big and a Little,” said Travis Gibson, BBBSA’s CTO. It takes an average of 6–8 weeks to complete this process, and the longer a Little waits, the harder it becomes to engage them — especially once they reach high school.

With more Littles waiting than ever before and a recent Super Bowl ad campaign expected to bring in hundreds of new Bigs, the need to speed up the matching process has never been more urgent.

Agentforce is projected to help matching specialists find the right Big for each Little in half the time.

BBBSA is creating a powerful tool that helps matching specialists find more compatible matches faster with Agentforce, the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform.

“When I heard about Agentforce, I thought right away this could be a solution that goes through our Matchforce information for us, is trained on our decades of research on how to build the strongest matches, and then provides recommendations to matching specialists in a transparent way,” said Gibson.

Every potential match starts with thoughtful conversations, where matching specialists interview prospective Bigs to ensure they know what to expect and are truly committed to mentorship. They also take the time to understand each Little — their personality, interests, backgrounds, and family’s priorities — to make sure they’re matched with a Big who can make a lasting impact. 

For example, if a Little’s parent believes it’s important for their child to have a Big who shares their religion, Agentforce allows the specialist to narrow the possibilities to only Bigs who align with the family’s values. Similarly, many Littles benefit from having a mentor who shares their gender or racial background. Having a positive role model who looks like them can be incredibly powerful, and Agentforce makes it easier for specialists to figure out which potential Bigs could be a strong match.

Agentforce reasons across BBBSA’s comprehensive data in Data Cloud, which unifies Matchforce data and decades’ worth of research and best practices into something Agentforce can use to assign compatibility scores for potential matches. These scores are based on factors like alignment on religion, racial background, or life experience and BBBSA’s research on how to build strong matches. Specialists can focus on the highest-scoring potential matches and further filter them down with additional factors like maximum driving distance away. This leaves matching specialists with a shortlist of potential Bigs who meet all of their requirements and are likely to be compatible with their Little. 

“I have this vision that Agentforce helps free up time for our matching specialists so they can spend more time interacting with the relationships that matter most to them,” said Gibson. “They can have a bigger impact if they spend more of their time with their matches, their parents, the Bigs, coaching them through what they're learning about the match as it's happening.”

Using predictive AI and the extensive, unified data set in Data Cloud showing what makes the longest-lasting matches, Agentforce can even predict how long a match is likely to last. BBBSA wants every match to last at least 18 months, ideally even longer, because strong matches mean fewer rematches and more impactful mentorship. Avoiding rematches is crucial — not only because it’s discouraging for kids to try to connect with a mentor and have it not work out, but also because it doubles the workload for matching specialists. By creating stronger, more sustainable matches from the start, BBBSA gives their Bigs and Littles the best chance to form a deep connection that fosters growth, confidence, and long-term success. 

With Agentforce, BBBSA aims to cut the average time it takes to make a match in half, increase the longevity of matches beyond the current 2.5-year average, and reduce the need for rematches. They also expect this streamlined matching process to be less costly, which will help the nonprofit put donor dollars to even more efficient use and expand their impact to help more kids.

Built-in safety features keep youth wellbeing and trust at the heart of every match.

One of the most important factors for BBBSA when choosing Agentforce was its built-in, customizable safety guardrails. Agentforce’s low-code Agent Builder tools make it easy to create and refine an agent that not only knows BBBSA’s standards of practice, but applies them to every match recommendation. 

"These standards of practice are extremely important for all kinds of reasons, but youth safety is at the top of our list,” said Gibson. “We're connecting young people with adult mentors so this is non-negotiable for us. We trust that Agentforce is going to follow these rules to a T."

The Trust Layer ensures privacy and confidentiality by applying data masking to all confidential data and encrypting all interactions between BBBSA and Bigs and Littles. It also uses zero data retention, meaning any sensitive information used for matchmaking is automatically deleted after use. This gives Agentforce access to real-time information while also protecting that information with industry-leading security and privacy controls.

Transparency is just as crucial as trust. Matching specialists need to understand why Agentforce recommends certain pairings.

“As AI is making recommendations, our staff wants to know, ‘Why are you making this recommendation? Why would this be a strong match?’” said Gibson. “While AI can raise and make these match recommendations for us, staff is ultimately going to be the ones that make the decision.”

Agentforce provides insight into the factors behind each recommendation, allowing specialists to assess compatibility beyond just numbers. And as specialists provide feedback on each recommendation — explaining why a match worked or didn’t — the system keeps learning, refining its recommendations to make even stronger connections. For example, if Agentforce suggests a Big-Little match with an 84% compatibility score, the specialist can dive deeper into the reasoning. Maybe both love music and dance, but the Little dislikes video games while the Big is an avid gamer. With that context, the specialist can decide — based on their own conversations — whether that difference is a dealbreaker.

The judgment and expertise of human specialists remain the heart of every match. Agentforce saves time by surfacing the most promising matches, but the final decision always rests with the human experts who know these kids best.

BBBSA makes it fast, last, and vast with Salesforce.

Since 2017, BBBSA has partnered with Salesforce to bring their digital transformation strategy to life, focusing on three key pillars: Make it fast, make it last, and make it vast.

In 2023, BBBSA advanced their “make it fast” pillar by rolling out Marketing Cloud and Experience Cloud to 160 agencies. Automating outreach tasks like scheduling interviews and processing applications cut volunteer onboarding time by 20% and helped get volunteer Bigs match-ready 21 days faster.

Now, Agentforce is helping them bring their next pillar — make it last — to life by empowering matching specialists to create stronger, longer-lasting matches, for more kids. And this is just the beginning.

BBBSA envisions building more autonomous agents with Agentforce to enhance post-match support. Right now, specialists manually track check-ins between Bigs, Littles, and families, which takes time away from making new matches. Agentforce will assist with scheduling, automate reminders, and seamlessly store call transcripts in Matchforce, ensuring consistent, meaningful follow-ups that strengthen relationships and extend mentorships.

For the “make it vast” pillar, BBBSA plans to have Agentforce scale fundraising efforts with automated, personalized donor outreach. This will help BBBSA build deeper connections with their supporters and expand their reach so they can change more lives nationwide.

For BBBSA, Matchforce is the foundation of their digital transformation — and Agentforce is the exciting next step. “We've spent years investing in and developing Matchforce,” said Gibson. “For Agentforce to be able to integrate into those workflows and leverage our existing workflows and logic that we’ve already built is huge for us. That would normally take a massive reinvestment, and we are able to avoid that with Agentforce.”

Agentforce takes action on top of Data Cloud, which taps into and harmonizes data across Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, and Experience Cloud to supply data-driven automation and insights that’ll help them increase volunteer engagement, drive fundraising, and make stronger, longer-lasting matches. The flexibility and integration of the deeply unified Salesforce Platform enables BBBSA to build on what they’ve already created, saving them time, money, and effort.

“It takes very little to be big,” said Sloane Keane, CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Orange County & The Inland Empire. “With Salesforce, we're bigger!”