Casting a Wide ‘Net’
The Humane Society of the United States successfully uses
the Internet to reach donors’ hearts — and their wallets.
March 2006
By Geoff Handy
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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.
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