The Nature Conservancy: Community Engagement Program

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.

Challenge

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 – Because everyone maintained their own separate contact lists, information was in siloes, or not recorded at all.
• Limited Insights – No system to store stakeholders made it difficult to identify stakeholders, track trends, and report on activities.
• Inefficiency – The small partnerships team needed new tools to manage their large (and growing) list of stakeholders.

Solution

To reach their goals, the team at TNC began looking for a software solution that would help them get better organized. They initially looked into their team’s existing fundraising software, but this wasn’t the right fit for their engagement goals. 

That was when TNC came across Simply Stakeholders. It was exactly what they were looking for — a tool that would help them get better organized and more informed as their program grows and develops.

Since implementing Simply Stakeholders, TNC have used the following features:

• Stakeholder Lists – New and existing stakeholder contacts are uploaded to Simply Stakeholders for easy tracking and management
• Contact Groups – Stakeholders are sorted into groups, so the team can easily see who is being engaged with, in what way, and how often
• Email Plugin – The Outlook email plugin allows the team to import data into Simply Stakeholders without leaving their inbox
• Analytics – The team can quickly access insights into contact groups, interactions, and outcomes 

As their community engagement program continues to grow, Natalie and the team are keen to explore Simply Stakeholders’ other capabilities, potentially rolling it out more broadly to other teams and projects.

Outcomes

As a result of implementing Simply Stakeholders, TNC Long Island can easily add, track, and manage their contacts within the community. This has impacted their work with:

• Streamlined Processes – The team can easily gather and organize their data, with processes that can scale up as their program grows and develops.
• Better Planning – Insights allow the team to see the impact of their work, know what’s working, and identify who they need to target next.
• Broader Engagement – The Nature Conservancy team is already finding new stakeholders to connect and engage with.

Engagement At a Glance

Borrow some ideas and tips for your next engagement:

• Think outside the box – Groups and sectors you don’t typically engage with may be more interested in your issues than you expect
• Attend regional gatherings – These are a great place to meet new people and start conversations
• Record contacts – After an initial conversation, add their contact info to your stakeholder software
• Follow up – Invite new contacts to a local preserve or meeting
• Map stakeholders – Visualize your stakeholders on a map to identify where your community members are located
• Be persistent and consistent – It usually takes a couple of meetings or calls to get a relationship moving
• Track your engagements – The number of interactions can gauge interest, trust, and momentum in the relationship

Simply Stakeholders were pleased to assist this organization in implementing a system to record and track stakeholders, supporting the team to reach more groups and scale up their partnerships. Our team will be here for ongoing collaboration and support as The Nature Conservancy taps into more features within the platform.