Eric Ciarla
Engage Together uses Firecrawl to map anti-trafficking programs and resources community by community, replacing a process that once required dozens of interns per region with a pipeline that collects data from thousands of websites automatically.
What is Engage Together? Engage Together helps communities strengthen their response to end and prevent human trafficking, providing the tools, training, technology, and support needed to care for survivors and at-risk populations.
When your mission depends on knowing every resource in a community, the research process is not a background task. Incomplete data means programs go undiscovered, survivors go unserved, and communities miss connections that could make a real difference.
Ashleigh Chapman, Founder & CEO at Engage Together, and her team understand this well. Their core methodology requires a comprehensive assessment of every program and resource in a community or state, a process so data-intensive it once required hiring a dozen interns per region just to collect the raw information.
What was the manual research process costing Engage Together?
The work runs in two phases. First, Engage Together works with their partner Pomerol to search the web and build a comprehensive list of every active anti-trafficking program, effort, and resource in a region. Second, the team collects detailed data on each entry: websites, addresses, contact numbers, partners, and program details.
That second phase was the bottleneck. Each region produced a long list of potentially relevant websites. Writing custom scraping logic for each one was not a scalable option.
What they needed instead was a generalized method that could handle any website in the search results, without building a one-off scraper each time.
How does Firecrawl fit into the data collection pipeline of Engage Together?
Engage Together was already architecting a solution when Firecrawl released its /extract API.
This (Firecrawl) took all the custom work out of it.
— Ashleigh Chapman, Founder & CEO, Engage Together
What remained was building an end-to-end process for handling the volume of asynchronous calls and storage. Marrying the partner search API with Firecrawl's /extract API became the simplest and most effective solution for their use case.
The integration required no forum support or Slack help. The documentation alone was sufficient.
What does the outcome look like for Engage Together?
If we had to stop using Firecrawl, we'd miss
/extractthe most, as it is a core component of our scraping process.
Firecrawl now acts as what Ashleigh calls "a robot intern," collecting critical information from thousands of websites in a fraction of the time it once took to do manually.
The team now spends the bulk of their time enriching and analyzing data, not finding it in the first place.
PS: The /extract endpoint is being deprecated. Firecrawl has launched /agent, the successor built for autonomous web extraction. Read more.
Ready to power your AI application with reliable web data? Try Firecrawl and ship faster.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Engage Together use Firecrawl?
Engage Together uses Firecrawl's /extract API to collect detailed data on anti-trafficking programs. After building a list of relevant websites with a partner search API, Firecrawl scrapes each site and returns structured data, eliminating the need to write custom scraping logic per website.
What problem does Firecrawl solve for Engage Together?
Firecrawl replaces the manual, intern-heavy data collection process that once required a dozen people per region. It provides a generalized scraping method that works across any website, regardless of structure or formatting.
What made Firecrawl the right fit for Engage Together?
The /extract API removed all the custom scraping work from the pipeline. The integration was smooth, the documentation was sufficient without needing forum or Slack support, and the result was a scalable solution that works across any website in their research set.
data from the web