The Challenge: Design a platform and strategy that enables one of the country's oldest conservation organizations to inspire meaningful action to save, protect, and restore America's wilderness, and to meet its ambitious targets for online growth, engagement, and fundraising.

The Solution: Strategically reorganize and rebuild Wilderness.org into a dynamic online presence and provide The Wilderness Society team with training and recommendations for effectively leveraging new media tools to communicate with their key audiences.

The Wilderness Society (TWS) has been at the forefront of the conservation movement for over seven decades, leading the charge to protect wilderness and inspire Americans to care for our wild places. However, in 2007 they made a commitment to changing not only the tools they used to communicate, but also the way the organization looked at engaging audiences and driving action — online and offline.

TWS set the challenging goals of expanding their online community to 600,000 subscribers and increasing their online fundraising to one million dollars annually by 2010. To help achieve these goals, TWS began working with EchoDitto in Spring of 2008 on a two-pronged effort to maximize the impact of their online communications.

First, through a series of recommendations, presentations, and training exercises, EchoDitto helped TWS craft and implement a new online communications and engagement strategy. Any organization can implement ad-hoc processes and strategies and achieve limited success; however to maintain a solid, growing online presence and take advantage of all the opportunities available via the social web, it was necessary to build a sustainable organizational environment to support their online efforts

To this end, we not only trained TWS on the latest best practices for social media and online outreach, but also guided them through the dramatic shifts — in organizational culture, communications, and thinking about audience engagement — required to optimally utilize these technologies.

Second, we built TWS a fully redesigned website driven by a modern, open source content management system, and featuring improved usability and a clean, engaging look-and-feel courtesy of design partner Biro Creative. The new site allows TWS to simplify and optimize their online efforts, providing them with a stable but flexible platform that will support future online initiatives.

As an early measure of success, in the month following the relaunch of Wilderness.org, visits to the site increased by 8% and total pageviews increased by 18% over the previous month. In addition, TWS saw a 90% increase in traffic driven from the main site to the action pages.

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