Casting a Wide ‘Net’

For years, Washington, D.C.-based The Humane Society of the United States ignored the Internet’s full potential to reach donors and supporters.

Here’s the situation we found ourselves in: HSUS’ Web site in April 2003 had been transferred to its third department in five years. While the site was graphically appealing and content rich, it ran on proprietary software developed by a company that no longer was in business.

Our two newsletters, which were sent to a combined 32,000 people, fared no better. One e-newsletter was sent sporadically, as time allowed, while the other was sent by an altogether different department, which was using a different e-mail messaging system.

We also were unable to tell who opened our e-mails. We didn’t ask our e-mail subscribers to donate — and it showed. Our online income in 2002 totaled $154,000, much of it from event registrations.

In short, we were Exhibit A for what happens when an organization lacks the commitment, strategy and technology needed to leverage the Internet to achieve its mission and raise needed funds.

The online community
Organizational commitment came first, when we decided to invest in the Internet as an avenue for recruiting new donors. We took a big, first step by consolidating all online communications functions — including e-mail communications, fundraising and the Web site — under one departmental roof.

We developed seven strategic objectives to guide our program — several borrowed from other nonprofits that seemed light-years ahead of us. Chief among the objectives was to use the Internet for advocacy and fundraising. We decided to start building relationships online as our fundamental approach to boosting the lifetime value of online advocates and donors. We enshrined this goal in the new department’s moniker: eCommunity.

By summer 2003 we had the commitment and the makings of a strategy, but the technology piece proved to be elusive.

It took us six more months to learn a valuable lesson: When you’re in the business of protecting animals, you shouldn’t also be in the business of developing software. In January 2004, we aborted our attempt to co-develop customized software to power the online program we had envisioned. Seven months later, we hired GetActive, a Berkeley, Calif.-based provider of relationship-management solutions for membership organizations, to provide the software for nearly all our online programs.

Key to the software — and to our strategy — was a database that finally would enable us to capture information about our online file and allow us to start building the online relationships with animal advocates and donors we coveted.

For example, we now could e-mail those who lived in North Carolina about a bill that would curb animal fighting in their state, or send a tailored fundraising appeal to people who’d signed our online pledge to boycott Canadian seafood (a key strategy in our campaign to end Canada’s cruel seal hunt).

Pulling it all together
And that’s exactly what we began to do. To shorten our learning curve, we hired Donordigital, a firm with offices in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, that specializes in online advocacy, marketing and fundraising. In addition to honing our strategy and helping us apply best practices, Donordigital instantly expanded our production capacity, with its in-house copywriters and Web designers.

We began to launch strategically planned serial campaigns designed not only to improve animals’ lives, but to engage our online advocates and recruit new ones. We committed ourselves to running only campaigns that reflected HSUS’ true priorities; this would ensure we would recruit and retain those online advocates and donors who were keyed into our mission and priority campaigns.

In November 2004, we launched our first, major, list-building campaign, the Petition for Poultry, an online petition that called on Congress to amend the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act to include poultry. The campaign resonated with animal advocates: Within three weeks, the petition had recruited more than 16,000 new members — thanks to our existing list members who urged friends and family members to sign the petition. Today, the petition has more than 147,000 signatures, each representing an active, online advocate.

We’ve been producing high-impact campaigns online ever since. Because HSUS is the largest public-policy organization in the animal-protection field, we’ve built much of our growth around online advocacy, which is tied to federal and state legislation. After all, when someone cares enough about an issue to sign a petition or fire off an e-mail to a representative, he’s also more likely to tell a friend about it or donate.

Today, more than 650,000 advocates and donors have opted in to receive e-mails from us. Nearly one in four of those people joined us as a result of their support for our high-profile, disaster-relief work following Hurricane Katrina. The majority of the rest have joined by taking action online. Collectively, these advocate-donors contributed more than $2 million online in 2005 to support HSUS programs — plus another $18 million in online
donations for our disaster-relief work.

HSUS benefits from conveying issues tailor-made for the Internet. After all, it’s a rare person who can look at a suffering or threatened animal’s face, and not feel sympathy or outrage, or both. By leveraging the Internet’s power, we’ve begun to translate those feelings into meaningful change for animals — and financial support for our cause.

Geoff Handy is director of eCommunity at the Humane Society of the United States. Contact: ghandy@hsus.org.