With many of its facilities in ruins, and its employees, customers, volunteers and donors scattered by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ Audubon Nature Institute turned to the Web to raise the money needed to get back to its mission.

By Abny Santicola

“It was, ‘Come to our facilities, we have all these great things to see and do; this is why you want to come here,’ versus, ‘We’re a nonprofit organization and we desperately need your support to fulfill our mission.’ So we had to kind of shift the focus,” Conkerton says.

But the positioning of its message had to be handled with tact as well, given the fact that ANI’s need was competing with serious human disasters.