How The Salvation Army Central Territory Strengthened Capability and Accelerated Mission-Critical Operations

• Customer: The Salvation Army Central Territory
• Industry: Non-profit
• Challenge: No centralized tracking of assigned versus completed training, limited ability to enforce compliance deadlines, and inadequate documentation across multiple department-level platforms
• Solution: Litmos satisfied all four of Central Territory’s selection criteria, including centralized management, audit defense, and scalability
• Outcomes: 93% compliance at high-exposure locations (up from 80.8%), 90% faster audit record retrieval, 78% faster corrective-action completion, volunteer credential verification reduced from days to near zero

Serving Those Who Serve Others

As The Salvation Army Central Territory expanded training across employees, volunteers, and departments, maintaining visibility into workforce capability became increasingly complex. Training was managed across multiple systems, making it difficult to consistently verify skills, credentials, and readiness at scale. By implementing Litmos, the organization centralized learning, accelerated volunteer deployment, and built a scalable training infrastructure supporting more than 8,000 employees and a volunteer network of 150,000 people across 11 states — all managed by just 20 administrators. 

Who Is The Salvation Army Central Territory?

The Salvation Army Central Territory equips employees, officers, and volunteers to deliver compassionate, consistent, and compliant service. That requires a training infrastructure that can deliver the right learning, verify readiness, and document completion across a complex organization. 

Many departments rely on this ecosystem: Environmental Health & Safety and Risk Management, Human Resources, Social Services, Emergency Disaster Services, Safe From Harm, Community Relations and Development, and Strategies and Outcomes. Their needs range from compliance and leadership development to case management consistency and disaster-response credentialing. 

The Challenge: 150,000+ Learners, No Visibility

Before implementing Litmos, The Salvation Army Central Territory’s approach to training was as fragmented as it was inconsistent. Each department managed learning independently, relying on a mix of platforms, paper records, and informal processes that created gaps in documentation, accountability, and internal compliance. 

As the organization grew across 8,000 employees, a volunteer network of 150,000 people, and 11 states, maintaining consistent workforce capability became increasingly complex. Without centralized visibility into learning, it was difficult to consistently verify required training, reinforce organizational standards, and ensure employees and volunteers were prepared when their skills were needed most. 

How Disconnected Systems Created Risks Across Safety, HR, and Disaster Response

For Safety and Risk Management, fragmented tracking made it difficult to monitor training completion, enforce deadlines, and maintain audit documentation. As Jessica Baker, Territorial EHS Director, explained: “Prior to implementing Litmos, several systemic risks existed across the organization. We had no centralized tracking of assigned versus completed training and limited ability to enforce compliance deadlines. Multiple platforms were being used across departments, which led to duplication of effort, inconsistent training quality, and variability in content and expectations between locations, ultimately increasing the risk of non-standard safety practices.” 

For HR, disconnected processes made it harder to verify mandatory training, follow up on overdue courses, and maintain accurate records. “Our biggest pain point was the lack of internal compliance and accountability caused by inconsistent and unreliable tracking,” said Akerah Mackey, Territorial HR Compliance, Culture & Training Director. “Without a centralized system, it was difficult to verify who had completed mandatory training, follow up on overdue courses, or maintain accurate records for audits and state requirements. This created unnecessary risk, made reporting time-consuming, and limited our ability to hold employees and managers accountable.” 

For Emergency Disaster Services (EDS), teams couldn’t quickly confirm who was ready for deployment across multiple systems. “Before Litmos, our biggest challenge was bridging the gap between systems, navigating a new platform, new terminology, and reporting processes that required Excel skills our team simply didn’t have. On the EDS side, we couldn’t verify training completion across multiple systems, assess volunteer and staff readiness, or consistently track required credentials,” said Michael Stack, Territorial Emergency Disaster Services Training Coordinator. “In time-sensitive disaster response situations, delays caused by missing training records are not just inefficient; they are potentially dangerous.” 

The Solution: Building a Platform for Learning Acceleration and Capability Management

The Central Territory prioritized centralized visibility, automated assignment and tracking, system integrations, and reliable audit documentation. 

Litmos addressed all four. “Litmos aligned strongly with our risk and safety priorities,” Baker explained. “It offered centralized training management across the entire territory, SCORM and external content integration, enhanced administrative control, reporting, and scalability, and strong audit documentation capabilities.” 

Location- and team-based assignments now route training by role, location, and risk exposure, helping a small administrative team standardize expectations across hundreds of locations without constant manual intervention. 

Implementation moved quickly, with go-live of their first department completed in less than a month by a two-person project team. Smooth onboarding and continued Admin on Demand support helped extend adoption across four departments. 

The Outcomes: From Centralization to Measurable Impact, Business Results Across Four Departments

Before Litmos, compliance gaps were often identified only when records were needed for an audit, regulatory request, incident review, or legal claim. Litmos transformed that manual, reactive process into an automated system with real-time visibility across the territory, allowing teams to identify gaps earlier and respond more quickly. 

“Litmos has significantly improved our ability to track, monitor, and enforce compliance-based training,” Baker confirmed. When a safety issue is identified, corrective training can be assigned, completed, tracked, and documented immediately — supporting faster remediation and a defensible record of reasonable care. 

Quantified Business Impact: 

• Audit readiness: Record request, retrieval, and review time decreased by more than 90%, turning weeks of preparation into hours. 
• Corrective action: Average training completion cycles and remediation efforts accelerated by 78%. 
• Training scale: Annual safety course completions increased from approximately 1,500 to 3,524 — a 135% increase — with 4,796 completions in the first six months of 2026. 
• Compliance improvement: Scores at high-exposure locations rose from 80.78% before implementation to 88.16% in 2024, 89.95% in 2025, and 93.01% in 2026. 
• Competency verification: The minimum demonstrated knowledge threshold increased from 75% to 100% for designated high-risk topics. 

Workforce Capability and Risk Mitigation: Accelerating HR’s Strategic Impact

For HR, Litmos created a consistent, trackable approach to compliance and workforce accountability. The team can now verify mandatory training, follow up on overdue courses, and maintain accurate records with real-time visibility. As Akerah Mackey explained, “Our biggest pain point was the lack of internal compliance and accountability caused by inconsistent and unreliable tracking. Without a centralized system, it was difficult to verify who had completed mandatory training, follow up on overdue courses, or maintain accurate records for audits and state requirements.” 

Litmos now supports required harassment prevention, employment law, and leadership development training, with completion and comprehension tracked across the organization. 

This structure gives HR a stronger foundation for reinforcing workplace expectations, supporting manager effectiveness, and reducing organizational risk. “Reporting that once required weeks of data gathering can now be completed in hours,” describes Akerah Mackey, Territorial HR Compliance, Culture & Training Director. 

Improving Program Outcomes: How Social Services Accelerated Capability Development and Service Quality

Social Services needed a consistent way to reinforce case management knowledge, terminology, and data-entry standards across locations. Variations in training made it harder to maintain a shared capability baseline and measure program effectiveness consistently. 

Litmos now delivers standardized onboarding on core duties, case management skills, and data-entry procedures, while tracking completion and comprehension. 

The program is designed to improve data accuracy, strengthen consistency in case management practices, and give leaders better visibility into program effectiveness. Current KPIs include completion, on-time completion, assessment results, and post-training survey scores. 

Operational Acceleration: How EDS Accelerated Volunteer Deployment and Reduced Response Time

When disaster strikes, EDS must mobilize trained, credentialed volunteers quickly. Before the Litmos and Golden integration, verifying credentials across systems could take days. 

Litmos now manages training across nine incident command functions and more than 20 role-specific subcategories. A few hundred teams reflect the organization’s natural structure while supporting a geographically dispersed volunteer base. 

The Golden integration connects training directly to deployment eligibility. “Litmos serves as the system of record for training completion, ensuring that individuals meet required credentialing standards before participating in response activities,” said Stack. “The integration between Litmos and the Golden volunteer management platform has turned credential verification from a manual bottleneck into an automated checkpoint: training completed in Litmos now directly determines eligibility for disaster response participation in Golden.” This eliminates a manual verification step that previously created delays and inconsistencies, establishing verified training as an operational prerequisite rather than an administrative formality. 

This year alone, EDS trained more than 4,000 workers. Over the past several years, it has credentialed more than 600 new volunteers, while automated reminders help existing volunteers keep credentials current. During major deployments, verification time has fallen to nearly zero, enabling trained volunteers to mobilize in hours instead of days. 

Beyond improving readiness, the blended learning model has also reduced training costs. Rather than relying on full, multi-day in-person courses that can cost approximately $150 per participant, EDS now delivers foundational learning online while verifying hands-on skills through in-person mentoring and volunteer opportunities. The result is a more cost-effective, scalable approach that prepares volunteers while reducing travel, meals, and other logistical expenses. 

Scaling Training Without Scaling Resources

The Litmos Content Authoring Tool enables teams to create, quality-assure, and deploy training in days rather than weeks or months, helping the organization respond more quickly when new operational or corrective training needs arise. 

Safety and Risk Management can rapidly launch corrective training, while EDS can build role-specific content for different learner types. Teams can also incorporate content created in tools such as Canva, use HSI SCORM courses to accelerate access to regulatory-grade training, and deliver instructor-led or blended learning through Teams and Zoom. 

“EDS has used the built-in Litmos Content Authoring Tool quite extensively, and it just keeps getting better and better, which makes Litmos really stand out. It’s not just an LMS but also a content authoring tool that allows us to engage different learner types while tracking and ensuring those learners have actually retained their learnings, so that they can help support the communities we serve,” said Stack. 

Another Litmos solution that Salvation Army Central Territory has taken advantage of is Litmos Professional Services, Managed Admin. According to Stack, “Litmos Managed Admin has really become a safety net for our team. They take a lot of the administrative work off our plate and, just as importantly, give us someone knowledgeable to go to when questions come up. Their knowledge of the system improves reliability and thus helps create a more positive experience for our learners. From a Safety & Risk perspective, they’ve become another layer in our hierarchy of controls — helping eliminate the administrative hazards before they reach our desk.” 

Together, these capabilities allow the Central Territory to create, update, and deliver training in days rather than months while managing learning through a connected platform and limiting the need for additional design resources. 

The Path Forward: Building on Measurable Impact

What began as a way to centralize training has grown into a learning platform supporting safety, compliance, leadership development, case management, and disaster response across more than 8,000 employees and a volunteer network of 150,000 people. 

Next, the Central Territory plans to expand automated learning paths, bite-sized refreshers, multilingual access, and capability analytics — helping keep skills current while reducing administrative effort. 

As Stack explains, “We’re working to build something great, a unified training experience that serves every person in our organization and ultimately helps us serve our communities better.”