Efficiency and Insights Help Scale Up Community Engagement Program

With no system to record and track stakeholders, The Nature Conservancy (Long Island) couldn’t progress further in its community engagement efforts. In early 2022, they implemented Simply Stakeholders to help them scale up their community partnerships and reach more groups. As a result, they were able to get more organized, improve their planning, and begin tapping into new stakeholder groups that were interested in conservancy within the region.

Situation:

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is a global environmental nonprofit with a mission to conserve land and water so that diversity of life can thrive. Part of their work involves engaging with other local conservation and community groups to help get more people involved in the conservation efforts.

Many people emerged from the pandemic with a greater appreciation of the outdoors. The Nature Conservancy Long Island wanted to capture this shift in attitudes to start conversations about their work. They saw an opportunity to engage beyond the conservation groups they regularly partnered with. If TNC could pull more community groups (for example, faith communities) into their conversations, they could potentially find others who would want to work towards some of the same goals.

In early 2022, TNC Long Island Community Partnership Manager, Natalie Ryan, began exploring stakeholder tools to help the team manage their existing community contacts and build relationships with new potential community partners.

Challenges:

Prior to 2022, The Nature Conservancy’s Long Island team did not have a single system for storing their stakeholder contacts.

This included Natalie, who came to her role with a large excel spreadsheet of community contacts she’d acquired throughout her career.

Without a dedicated stakeholder management system, the team found it difficult to scale up their community engagement efforts. Specific challenges included:

• Disorganization
• Limited Insights
• Inefficiency

Want to learn how The Nature Conservancy managed to resolve these challenges? Read the full case study here.