Five campaigns, every channel, one GA4 dashboard.

Summary

Frontline Justice mobilizes, supports, and equips trusted community advocates to become frontline legal helpers — justice workers who ensure all Americans have access to affordable and effective support on everyday civil matters. The work is national in scope, and it runs on touchpoints: monthly virtual events, quarterly newsletters, training launches, an online platform, and campaigns co-promoted with legal aid partners.

Every one of those touchpoints is a link, and for a small nonprofit team the question is always the same: is this reaching anyone? Linkly answers it in Google Analytics, where the rest of the team’s reporting already lives.

Background: mobilizing a national network of community justice workers

Frontline Justice’s outreach focuses on the people already embedded in their communities: shelter volunteers, community health workers, faith leaders, community health aides, benefits navigators, and other trusted advocates who already provide essential help to community members. The organization’s scope is national, establishing a network of community justice workers and partnerships, while also working at state and local levels to provide technical assistance for new programs.

Beyond mobilizing that network, the strategy targets four distinct audiences — community-based potential partners trying to solve service gaps without hiring attorneys; legal partners, where the job is to reduce skepticism and position community justice workers as ethical, structured, supervised, and evidence-based; policymakers and researchers, where the goal is category authority and verified credibility; and funders who can help scale community-based justice solutions.

Four core initiatives carry that strategy:

• Training modules. Specialized training for community justice workers, to provide people with civil legal help, including process guidance, preparing documents, and explaining resources and options.
• Community Cafés. A monthly virtual event bringing community justice workers, allies, and advocates together to learn from one another about programs, regulatory reform, and training.
• Groundwork. An online platform launched in May 2025 — a hub connecting community justice workers, advocates, and allies, with resources, toolkits, and designated groups for shared interests like disaster relief and state-specific work.
• Technical assistance. Working with funders, community-based organizations, and state leaders to design and implement community justice worker programs — program models, supervision frameworks, implementation planning, training deployment, and policy development.

The challenge: a shortener that charged for every answer

Frontline Justice needed support to track clicks and analyze user data. However, the organization needed a more powerful tool to retrieve additional data.

Why Linkly: GA4 was the deciding factor

Frontline Justice runs communications through Zoho CRMPlus, which provides analytics for social media and email campaigns. But one thing it couldn’t show was trends in when — the date and time — users click.

So the search criterion was specific rather than general. Not “a better shortener” — a shortener that would feed a GA4 dashboard for UTM tracking. That single requirement was the deciding factor for transitioning to Linkly.

Migrating without breaking what was already published

The risk in leaving a shortener is everything already in circulation — links in past newsletters, on printed materials, in social posts that still get traffic. Frontline Justice imported its links into Linkly for tracking, and links previously posted publicly stayed accessible. Nothing already out in the world broke.

Setup was quick, and the team used Linkly’s support chat along the way — getting a fast response and troubleshooting direction rather than a ticket number.

How Frontline Justice uses Linkly today

One link per channel, even for the same URL

The core discipline is deliberate duplication. The team creates a separate link for each medium or channel even when every one points to the same destination. That’s what makes it possible to break down where users are being acquired, and how often and when people engage — rather than watching one undifferentiated counter tick up.

Naming that survives five campaigns at once

The team previously kept track in an Excel spreadsheet. Now Linkly auto-generates a nickname when a URL is dropped in — a Groundwork URL might come back as “Join Now | Groundwork | Justice by all” — and the team edits it to connect to the campaign. “Groundwork Community Cafe Debrief Group-Social” encodes the destination, the campaign, and the channel in the name itself.

QR codes that outlive the print run

QR codes are unlimited and can be customized with a logo and branded colors — and, critically, the underlying URL can be changed without creating a new link or QR code. A code printed on a flyer or embedded in a slide deck isn’t frozen to wherever it pointed the day it was made.

Groundwork: short links people can read out loud

Groundwork has been gaining momentum since its May 2025 launch, and every promotion for it runs through a Linkly link with GA4 triggers and UTM parameters. During a live Community Café, the team plugs the Groundwork Community Café Debrief group — where attendees continue the conversation after the event. Linkly’s custom URL shortener produces links short and memorable enough to share out loud in a live session, and QR codes go into the presentation when the ask is to join the hub.

Newsletter and Stories

The quarterly newsletter carries news, resources, and highlights. When it features a community justice worker, it links out to the full write-up on the Frontline Justice “Stories” page — with a Linkly link. When a new Groundwork resource ships, the newsletter blurb links to the platform with its own Linkly URL.

Launches and waitlists

For a new initiative or training, the team creates separate links for each medium used to promote it. The recent community justice worker SNAP training is the template: a social campaign with a waitlist CTA, a link created to track who clicks through from those posts, and an Airtable survey capturing the data behind it — including the UTM source. As the training rolls out across other mediums, the same process shows where interested individuals are coming from.

Partner coordination

Collaborations with legal aid orgs, community advocates, and law firms produce shared deliverables — email campaigns, social media press kits, presentation templates. The team creates registration links, QR codes for digital and printed materials, and links to resources and learning materials. When Frontline Justice isn’t the primary host, it shares its links and QR codes with the partner to include in their communications.

Anatomy of a Community Café

The monthly Community Café shows the whole pattern end to end. The same process repeats for convening registrations and every other event the team hosts, in person or virtual.

The finding that changed what they publish

At least every other month, Frontline Justice produces a new resource for Groundwork members. Every promotion of it — inside the Groundwork hub, via email, or on social — carries a tracking link.

Across those cycles, one pattern separated itself from the noise: engagement went up when the resource provided hard evidence of community justice worker effectiveness. That’s not a marketing insight, it’s a content strategy one — and it only exists because every resource launch was tracked the same way, long enough to compare. It changed the type of resource content the team produces.

Results

The shift isn’t really about click counts. It’s that a small team running five concurrent campaigns can now see which of them is working, tell that story to funders with evidence rather than assertion, and — as the Groundwork resource cycle showed — change what they publish based on what the data says people actually want.

Telling the impact story

Frontline Justice creates impact reports, applies for grants, and reports out on the success of its initiatives. Linkly supplies the data showing how people engage with the work: which campaigns succeed or exceed expected reach, and where interest in a topic or resource is rising or falling. Linked to GA4, the team can identify where drop-offs occur and bring new strategies to partners and stakeholders.

Even a single post counts. A link on social covering breaking news or research from the organization reports back exactly how many people engaged with it.

Advice for other nonprofits

Frontline Justice is building a movement on distributed outreach: this is a practical and easy way to keep links organized to retrieve meaningful data over time. Used consistently, it provides supporting evidence for data-driven decisions and better user journeys.

The team also points out that the value isn’t confined to marketing. A social media manager wants to know how often people click a link in a post, at what time of day, and how that compares to last month. A product designer wants to know how many users click through from the homepage to the contact page, to measure conversions and test whether the user journey strategy is working. An HR recruiter can see how candidates interact with job postings across job boards, social, referrals, and email — and identify which channels attract the most qualified applicants.

Frequently asked questions