LexisNexis® Risk Solutions Partners with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children®
Prompted by the murder of their son, Adam, John and Revé Walsh founded the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 1984, an organization that has changed the way the nation — and now the world — deals with missing child cases in terms of protocol and procedures for law enforcement, support for the families of the children and mechanisms for the public to aid in the efforts.
In 2024, NCMEC assisted law enforcement with 29,568 cases of missing children in that year alone, helping to bring 91% of them home. This brings the total number to over 450,000 missing children that NCMEC has helped law enforcement recover in the advocacy group’s first 40 years.
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions is a partner at another level.
But they don’t do it alone, says Callahan Walsh, Co-host of America’s Most Wanted and an Executive Director at NCMEC. Callahan is also the younger brother of Adam Walsh. Explaining the importance of strong partnerships with both the public and private sectors, Walsh categorizes LexisNexis Risk Solutions as “a partner on another level.”
“A lot of times, you have a partner that comes in and you see them once a year when they make a very generous donation, and that’s great because we need financial partners. But LexisNexis Risk Solutions provides us not only with financial assistance but also operational assistance with their technology expertise.”
And that’s where the Automated Delivery of Alerts on Missing Children (ADAM) Program comes in. LexisNexis Risk Solutions was already donating technology products to aid NCMEC when employee, Trish McCall, senior director, stepped up to co-found the ADAM Program in 2000 with Patti Willingham, executive director over the Missing Children Division of NCMEC. Named as a tribute to Adam Walsh, the program uses geotargeted technology to quickly distribute missing child posters and case details to police, news media, schools, businesses, medical centers and everyday citizens. This is the same type of missing child poster that led to the rescue of Alicia Kozak. (Today, Alicia is an advocate for internet safety, missing person and child safety legislation. Read about Alicia's Law.
In 2024 alone, 1,959 missing child cases were processed through the ADAM Program and more than 1,380 were resolved by photo distribution and other efforts.
“We have a lot of different programs at NCMEC that are all effective in their own way,” explains Walsh. “But the ADAM Program is immediately effective in our mission of finding missing kids. It directly affects what we set out to tackle 40 years ago when my parents started what was originally called the Adam Walsh Resource Center in our garage on a card table and a landline telephone. It’s a shining example of harnessing the power of technology to bring home children faster than ever before.”
Over time, innovative features were added to make it easier for NCMEC to circulate these images to more and more people. By 2015, the posters were also being emailed, and today, text message alerts are also an option for bringing in the general population to help in the recovery efforts. A sign-up form is housed on the adamprogram.com website for anyone to sign up and receive alerts in their area so they can play a key part in finding missing children. McCall credits her company’s commitment to the ADAM Program, which includes strong support from the executive team, as key to making it such a successful initiative.
Easy Equals Effective with Interactive Dashboard
As the ADAM Program marks its 25th year, the teams behind the program are doubling down on their commitment to help find missing children. In fact, the recent launch of the interactive missing children dashboard has significantly extended the reach of the program. Now, instead of the posters reaching only the people who have signed up to receive alerts, anyone, anywhere, anytime can access the dashboard and view a map of the U.S. representing all the missing children that NCMEC is using the ADAM Program for photo distribution. And from there, you can click on a specific poster to view it on the NCMEC website and easily share it through social channels and email. Another feature is that you can search on any geographic area; so, if you’re traveling, the dashboard offers many different views to drill down and filter on missing children in any particular area.
The dashboard puts the ADAM Program in the hands of everybody and makes it really easy for all of us to play a critical role in the recovery efforts,” explains McCall, who credits her colleague Robin Campbell as the technologist who brought her vision to life. Campbell, an Air Force veteran who has worked at LexisNexis Risk Solutions for a decade, is an expert in data visualization and recognized the potential power of making the ADAM Program more visible right away.
“Our goal was to make robust changes to the platform that included creating a visual that depicted all of the missing kids in the ADAM Program,” states Campbell, a senior project manager in the Applied AI & Cloud Engineering (ACE) organization at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “We’ve created a way to use the technology that we built for our everyday business and use it in a way that gives back to the community. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the ADAM Program and use the technology for such good. You can’t help but feel that it’s personal.”
- Robin Campbell, Senior Project Manager in the Applied AI & Cloud Engineering organization at LexisNexis Risk Solutions
For Walsh, he points out that the ADAM Program has always tried to have a very low threshold, and that keeping it that way through upgrades like a nimble and agile dashboard that allows users to customize their experience is how the program will be the most successful. “Any time that you can make technology easier for individuals to onboard makes things much more effective in the long run,” he submits. “We want to make sure that all businesses and the public can easily access the ADAM Program, easily get these alerts, easily make sure that the alerts are geotargeted and make sense where they are geographically.
Meeting Today’s Challenges
As technologies have advanced, the work by LexisNexis Risk Solutions has positioned the ADAM Program to adapt to the modern era. “The world’s population has stabilized but child trafficking is at an all-time high, and the United States is not immune to that,” says U.S. Congressman Rich McCormick of Georgia’s 7th District. “And as an ER doctor, I’ve seen some horrific things. When you lose a patient in an ER who is a child, you never forget.”
“We need more measures to protect children — and this is a bipartisan issue.”
– U.S. Congressman Rich McCormick of Georgia’s 7th District
After recently learning about the ADAM Program and the extensive support that LexisNexis Risk Solutions provides to NCMEC, Rep. McCormick applauds this model of how private and public sectors can work together to make a substantial difference. He also looks forward to getting involved in helping to sponsor legislation as a member of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology and is a proponent of introducing digital IDs for children on a voluntary basis as an effective tool in keeping them safe.
