Conservation International

Conservation International Gets a Deeper Understanding of its Constituents, Volunteers, and Fundraising Programs with Blackbaud Performance Management

Conservation International (CI) achieves strategic and lasting conservation outcomes through its work with a vibrant network of global partners. Visionary pragmatists, CI is focused on addressing urgent environmental threats, as well as the long-term health of Earth’s most vital land and marine ecosystems. The organization works to protect the biological diversity of life on Earth and to demonstrate that people can live in harmony with nature. Working with more than 1,000 partners worldwide, from multinational corporations to local community groups, CI has protected 1.2 million square kilometers on land, in freshwater habitats, and at sea.

The Challenge

• The type, level, and number of gifts Conservation International receives created a number of unique reporting requirements for the organization.
• It also needed to be able to compare revenue against projections for various periods of time in a single consolidated report.
• Another driving need of the organization was moves management tracking. The organization wanted to track constituents at any given time as they moved from the membership program to annual giving and eventually to the major donor level with a push of a button. 
• The organization’s lack of a robust solution to quickly and accurately produce multidimensional data analysis was costing the team countless hours.

The Solution

• Blackbaud Performance Management, which utilizes Microsoft SQL server, gives nonprofits more flexibility in designing reports while providing the multi-dimensional data analysis needed to truly interpret and understand the data.
• Specifically, Conservation International has found the use of scorecards extremely beneficial. The scorecards enable each department to quickly and easily view their status on identified key performance indicators.
• With the help of Blackbaud Performance Management, the organization is able to see constituents as they move through the process, and determine how many constituents they have in each phase at any given time in a single view. This analysis enables CI to really look at the constituent behavior and see how donors move through the organization, providing an accurate and up-to-date picture.

The Results

• Performance Management provides a much easier way for Conservation International to do more robust trend analysis.
• Performance management has saved the team a significant amount of time – decreasing the amount of time to run complex reports anywhere from 70 to 80 percent. 
• A report that could have taken days before Performance Management recently took CI’s reporting manager 30 minutes to run the report, format it, and print it out using Blackbaud Performance Management.
• Management at CI has the ability to easily and quickly access the information they need, to make the decisions they need to make, when they need to make them. .