Helping an Environmental Organization Take Flight

We helped Israel’s largest environmental organization build its fundraising capacity and reach donors in the U.S. with a new brand, website, and digital campaigns.

Services

• Brand & Website Analysis
• Brand Positioning & Messaging
• Membership Benefits
• Website Copywriting
• Website Design
• Website Development
• Digital Donor Acquisition Campaigns
• Advocacy Petitions
• Webinars
• Fundraising Emails
• Fundraising Direct Mail
• Promoting Travel to Israel

Defining the Brand

Our first step was to leverage unique insights to establish a clear brand value. The organization had presented itself as protecting wildlife, advocating for nature, educating the public, and providing recreational opportunities in nature.

But to get the brand noticed in the United States, something more was needed.

Leveraging Israel’s reputation as a start-up nation for innovation —with its technology improving lives globally — we positioned Nature Israel as the green beacon for the world. As one of the most dense, diverse, and developed countries on Earth, Israel’s environmental solutions could have far-ranging impact for other countries.

Telling the Story

In order to engage donors in the organization’s work and impact, we created a presentation that describes its success in conservation, education, activism, and eco-tourism.

Webinar to Introduce this Nonprofit’s Brand

We created a webinar as a way to introduce Nature Israel to American audiences and generate leads, promoting it on Facebook with various audience targeting strategies. The webinar highlighted environmental technology that came out of Israel, featured the membership benefits chart we developed to engage people in membership, and invited webinar participants to visit the organization’s sites in Israel.

Digital Campaign to Attract Prospective Donors

To engage audiences, the website features webinars, a travel section, petitions, and other features to generate leads and cultivate prospective donors. The lead generation features are integrated into MailChimp and Salesforce to create a robust database for the organization.

Using Petitions to Generate Leads

Our fundraising goals include generating new leads for Nature Israel and cultivating them as potential donors. To accomplish this, we implemented a 2-stage process. We attracted new leads by promoting petitions, a webinar, and blog posts on Facebook.

The campaigns led people to a Facebook form or landing page where we collected emails. We used five different audience targeting strategies, and A/B split testing on all ads. This has enabled us to collect more than 7,000 leads in a short period of time. The next phase involves cultivating these prospects into donors through a series of email campaigns.

Promoting Eco-Tourism

To cultivate larger donors, Nature Israel is running trips to experience “the wild side of Israel” — its amazing wildlife and nature sites. We created a Nature Israel Travel section on the website with extensive pages about each trip, brochures, email campaigns, and social posts.

Building a Fundraising Infrastructure

As Nature Israel’s strategic fundraising partner, we are setting a foundation for their growth by:

• Creating an Operations Manual that documents all fundraising and marketing processes and is continually updated as needed.
• Providing critical technological support in setting up and maintaining their back-end systems, including the WordPress website, MailChimp, Classy, and integrations between systems.
• Cleaning up lists in MailChimp by consolidating tags.
• Creating an Editorial Style Guide to ensure consistent communications throughout the organization.
• Developing a master Marketing Calendar including emails, fundraising, event promotion, and other activities.
• Coordinating marketing and fundraising activities with the Israel team.
• Creating direct mail packages, handling printing and mailing management.
• Introducing personalization and custom gift arrays in their direct mail.
• Producing special fundraising projects, including Tribute Books.
• Promoting organizational events in the United States.

“Howard and his team managed a rebrand and new website launch for Nature Israel. They really helped bring our organization into the 21st century. The website that they created is just beautiful and we are constantly getting this feedback. The SEO optimization they implemented is truly awesome, bringing us many new people from organic searches. Most importantly, this has brought it new major donors, including several major corporate entities looking for water offsets and environmental organizations in the region. Howard’s thought partnership helped Nature Israel take a great leap forward and he remains a true friend of our organization. He remains responsive to this day. I highly recommend him.”

– Rachel Canar, Executive Director