How Make-A-Wish is modernizing communications across 50+ chapters with Clerk Chat

For more than 45 years, Make-A-Wish America has granted life-changing wishes to children with critical illnesses. The mission is delivered locally, through more than 50 independently chartered chapters serving every community across the United States. Each chapter operates its own staff, donor base, and day-to-day systems, all united under one of the most trusted nonprofit brands in the world.

That structure is the source of Make-A-Wish’s strength. It’s also the reason communications technology has always been hard to get right.

The challenge

Before partnering with Clerk Chat, Make-A-Wish ran on a standalone voice system from Vonage, with no integrated business messaging at all. The setup was no longer serving the organization or the families it exists to support.

Wish families, donors, and volunteers increasingly expected to reach Make-A-Wish by text, the same way they communicate with every other organization in their lives. Chapter staff had no compliant way to text from a business number, so conversations either didn’t happen or happened on personal devices with no visibility, no continuity, and no governance. The voice experience itself wasn’t meeting the bar a mission like Make-A-Wish deserves.

Any modernization also had to scale across more than 50 chapters nationwide, each with different team sizes and workflows, and a shared commitment to keeping every dollar focused on granting wishes rather than managing IT. Make-A-Wish needed a communications platform built for that reality: modern, mobile-first, governed, and consistent across every chapter, while still living inside the Microsoft environment their teams already used every day.

The solution

Make-A-Wish migrated off Vonage and onto a unified communications platform combining Microsoft Teams for voice and Clerk Chat for SMS and RCS messaging.

Chapters now make and receive calls through Microsoft Teams while sending messages through Clerk Chat’s Microsoft Teams SMS integration. Chapter staff text wish families, donors, and volunteers from their existing business numbers without ever leaving the Teams interface they already work in every day. Conversations are logged, searchable, and visible across the team, eliminating the shadow texting that had previously happened on personal devices.

This level of alignment means Make-A-Wish can roll the same experience out consistently to every chapter, empowering local autonomy while giving the national office the visibility a network of this scale requires. Clerk Chat is currently partnering with Make-A-Wish on a phased nationwide rollout to every U.S. chapter.

Even at this stage, with fewer than half of chapters live, activity is accelerating. May 2026 was the busiest month yet at more than 46,000 messages, pointing to significant headroom as the platform reaches every chapter.

Make-A-Wish is also showcasing their eye for innovation by ramping up on the latest evolution of business messaging via RCS in Microsoft Teams with Clerk Chat. RCS adds verified branding, rich media, and read receipts, giving Make-A-Wish chapters a way to communicate with families in an experience that matches the trust the brand has earned over four decades.

The impact

For Make-A-Wish America, the shift has delivered a communications foundation built for how their network actually operates:

• More than 280,000 messages in just over a year, exchanged with wish families, donors, and volunteers through Clerk Chat, including nearly 119,000 inbound replies, all with fewer than half of chapters live.
• A modern, mobile-first channel for reaching wish families, donors, and volunteers via SMS and RCS, meeting people where they already are.
• Full governance and visibility across customer-facing conversations, with shadow texting on personal devices eliminated.
• Real two-way dialogue at scale: more than 4 out of every 10 messages come inbound from families, donors, and volunteers, the conversations that previously weren’t happening at all or were lost on personal devices.
• One platform, one experience across voice and messaging, reducing tool sprawl and lowering the operational lift on every chapter.
• A scalable rollout model that works for chapters ranging from small teams to large offices, all sharing the same Microsoft-governed platform.

"As a leader with operational oversight, the ability to centralize services while securely integrating with internal resources is the holy grail of IT Management. For our end users at the chapters, the seamlessly integrated Salesforce connections allows us to focus more on effectively communicating with Wish Families, instead of manually transposing notes across systems. For Wish Families, we now have the ability to group text with both several members, increasing transparency and efficiency throughout the Wish journey!"

Gerrad Mitchell

Director, Infrastructure Architecture & Engineering

A platform that matches the brand

The result is a communications experience that finally matches the modernity, trust, and consistency the Make-A-Wish brand has stood for since 1980.