Nature Conservancy's Nancy Eiring on Earth Day 2010 Campaign, Part 2

[Editor's note: This is part 2 of a two-part interview with Nancy Eiring, director of acquisition at the Nature Conservancy, about the 2010 Earth Day campaign. Click here for part 1.]

FS: What other channels were incorporated?
NE: In the states, a lot of them did takeovers of different Web networks. We did screening events in the individual states. We have an online newsletter that we send out monthly, so we promoted Earth Day inside all the states and also in their printed newsletters.

FS: What were the specifics goals of the campaign?
NE: We always look to increase the metrics from the previous year. We did have certain benchmarks — one was growing our e-mail subscriptions, and we hit that mark. The other one is Web traffic, and in terms of Web traffic over the month of April we had 78 percent more visits to Nature.org on Earth Day. We had a splash page for the campaign as well, and we had 105 percent more views of that page than in previous years.

FS: How did donors donate to the campaign?
NE: Donating was all online. We had an Earth Day landing page that was updated each week with those new tips we e-mailed out - i.e., how to keep our oceans healthy.

FS: What worked well with this campaign?
NE: Having the participation at the state level where our states pushed out content and took advantage of opportunities, whether it be those screening events or doing an online ad on their state media news sites. It's not that we haven't had that level of participation in the past, but it was amplified. It was really amazing that everybody was operating on all cylinders. It also clearly helped that we laid out how they could get involved and how to make it easier for them so they weren't reinventing the wheel along the way.

We've learned that when we work together we have greater success. Everyone is very focused on the digital aspect and is heavily involved in the social media and creating great Web content on their state pages that they look for opportunities where they can really have these campaigns. This one really lent itself as a great opportunity for everyone.

FS: What challenges did you face along the way?
NE: How do you re-create another successful event year after year? One of the things that helped was the Disney movie, so how do we re-create this success without having a vehicle such as that?

We don't have the movie, but we try to make it accessible and informative and fun and exciting.

FS: What did you learn most from this campaign?
NE: The one big thing is having a strategy, sharing it with everyone and providing the tools to implement it — as simple as that.