What do leatherback turtles, burning forests and Harrison Ford all have in common?
They're the key components of some very successful marketing campaigns launched by Conservation International, a nonprofit organization missioned to protect the richest regions of plant and animal diversity in 34 international biodiversity hot spots, wilderness areas and marine ecosystems.
With headquarters in Arlington, Va., CI works in more than 40 countries on four continents. Last year, it distributed more than $30 million in funding to its partners to implement conservation activities. And over the past six years, it has provided more than $97 million to fund more than 1,200 nongovernmental groups, as well as small businesses that employ nearly 15,000 local people.
Lost there, felt here
To raise awareness about the effect of deforestation on global warming, the organization recently launched its "Lost There, Felt Here" campaign.
"What people might not know is that the burning and flashing of forests for crop land and things like that actually contributes 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, which greatly affect climate change," says Vinnie Wishrad, senior director of community and membership at CI. "If we can do something about that, we can curb a big component of climate change."
The campaign centers around giving people the option to donate $15 to "protect an acre" of forestland to stop climate change. They also can donate more acres in $15 increments.
According to CI, the donations support scientists and project teams in tropical forest areas around the world where deforestation is most prevalent, such as Madagascar, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil and Colombia.
To donate, people can go to CI's Web site -- www.conservation.org -- click on the "Lost There, Felt Here" icon featuring an image of campaign spokesman Harrison Ford and then click on a highlighted square box in the center of a grid with a forest backdrop. The box takes visitors to a landing page that enables them to donate online with a credit card. Visitors also can mouse-over the square-acre boxes to see their names and the number of acres they've given.
Austin, Texas-based Convio, an Internet software and services company that works exclusively with nonprofit organizations, is the vendor CI chose to help process this information.
"Most of the donation information -- besides the credit card information -- is being captured in Convio's system, where it is permanently stored and initially captured," Wishrad says. "Indirectly, Convio is storing the information that shows in the grid."
For all of its campaigns, CI relies on a variety of tools from Convio, including e-mail marketing, fundraising, surveys, widgets, the company's PageBuilder content management solution and its Convio Connector, which syncs CI's offline Raiser's Edge donor database -- a Blackbaud product -- with Convio's database.
As a viral component of the campaign, visitors also can participate by becoming ambassadors for change; the site offers ideas for actions such as cutting a square into a T-shirt, mowing a square onto a lawn or creating donuts with square centers to represent lost forests.
Ford -- who sits on the board of directors of the environmental organization -- even got into the act, having his chest waxed in a square shape in a public service announcement that can be seen on CI's Web site or YouTube. The PSA will run on both sites until the end of the year.
In fact, the entire campaign will run through the end of the year and include additional phases, although what those phases are is under discussion right now, Wishrad says.
About Conservation International
Headquarters: Arlington, Va.
Web address: www.conservation.org
Number of employees: 1,000 worldwide
Total revenue: During FY06, CI raised more than $108 million in revenue, representing a 16 percent increase over FY05 levels. This represents the third year of steady growth since FY03.
History: In a Washington, D.C. hotel room on a cold February night in 1987, a small group of pioneers single-handedly redefined conservation. Instead of keeping places intact as relics of the past, [it] envisioned conservation as a working model of the future -- a future in which people lived in harmony with nature. Conservation International has made this future a reality with the support of an ever-expanding list of key players. For more than 20 years [it has] empowered communities in jungles and deserts to make conservation part of their livelihoods. [CI has] worked with companies large and small to make conservation part of [its] business model. Governments from Costa Rica to China have worked with [CI] to make conservation a core component of their national policies. Throughout this process, every strategy, every action has been guided by ground-breaking science.
Marketing philosophy/goals: To build brand awareness, increase membership and create a global conservation ethic.
Source: Conservation International
