Audubon Hopes Unifying Chapters Can Make Conservation Last

Under the leadership of David Yarnold, the National Audubon Society has worked to build fundraising, program, and marketing connections across regions. Here, Mr. Yarnold visits a program in Mexico. Under the leadership of David Yarnold, the National Audubon Society has worked to build fundraising, program, and marketing connections across regions. Here, Mr. Yarnold visits a program in Mexico.

April 1, 2012 | Read Time: 8 minutes

At a Delaware Bay nature center he visited last year, Eric Draper, executive director of the Audubon of Florida, got to thinking about Red Knots, colorful shore birds whose numbers are shrinking fast.

His Audubon chapter works to preserve areas of Florida’s beaches that are vital stopovers for the migrating birds, which each year make a stunning 18,000-mile round trip from their breeding grounds high in the Arctic to their winter homes on South America’s southernmost tip.

As Mr. Draper looked out over the Delaware Bay, he was reminded what a critical role the bay plays in the Red Knots’ migration. Every May, on their way north, the birds stop there to feast on the eggs of spawning horseshoe crabs.

“A light went off in my head: We can’t save these birds in Florida alone,” Mr. Draper says. “It was something that I vaguely knew, but I was always so focused on what we were doing in Florida that I hadn’t given it much thought.”

Mr. Draper says Audubon of Florida is now looking to integrate its work to aid the shore birds with those of Audubon chapters in Delaware and other East Coast states. And it is talking to foundations and Florida donors about increasing their support for a more comprehensive hemispheric approach to protecting birds and their habitats.

Such changes in Florida mirror broader ones under way at the National Audubon Society. The 107-year-old organization has made sweeping changes over the last year and a half to corral affiliates around the country to focus on its mission and fundraising. Its aim is to create a more collaborative model of operation. While the final results of the transformation are still being debated by the charity’s supporters and employees, its story may offer lessons for other national nonprofits seeking greater cohesion among their far-flung chapters.

“We are a grass-roots organization that will continue to work locally, but we are building the necessary connectedness to make a broad conservation impact,” says David Yarnold, the group’s president, who took over in 2010 and is widely credited with sparking the changes. “We are building that future around Audubon’s heart and soul: birds.”

A Re-Energized Brand

Audubon, made up of a fractured network of hundreds of chapters, state offices, education centers, and sanctuaries around the country, is placing greater emphasis on sharing fundraising and back-office duties and, perhaps most decisively, re-energizing its brand.

Instead of organizing its work state by state or chapter by chapter, Audubon has adopted an overarching strategy based on the four major flyways—or migratory paths—of the Western Hemisphere. That means, for example, that the science, conservation goals, land-use discussions, advocacy work, and fundraising related to saving Red Knots would be coordinated under the banner of the Atlantic Flyway, not just locally and separately by Audubon groups up and down the coast.

The changes represent a sharp turnaround for Audubon, which has traditionally given wide berth to its affiliates to work and raise money autonomously. The organization in recent decades also allowed its attention to drift away from birds and conservation to a hodgepodge of less-specific environmental goals, like connecting people with nature, according to Mr. Yarnold.

He felt, too, that Audubon was not using its well-known brand and wide reach to raise as much money as it could or to make its voice heard at the national level.

Last year, he asked chapters to sign a letter urging the U.S. Senate to preserve government spending to uphold federal clean-water and clean-air regulations. More than two-thirds of Audubon’s 465 chapters signed, in a move that marked, according to Mr. Yarnold, the first time in more than 20 years that an Audubon president set out to rally chapters behind a public-policy issue.

“We are now a network willing to speak up and be counted,” he says.

A former journalist, Mr. Yarnold came to the nonprofit world in 2005 in a top position at the Environmental Defense Fund. His overarching goal at Audubon, he says, is to take the organization’s “legacy brand and use it to build its future.”

Early in his Audubon tenure, Mr. Yarnold dropped a strategic plan adopted in the mid-1990s that called for state offices to build a total of 1,000 nature-education centers by 2020. The goal was deemed too costly by far, and more important, according to Mr. Yarnold, not focused on the protection of birds and their habitats.

Other changes came quickly, including replacing five of Audubon’s seven top executives; integrating databases of donor information from across the country; reaching out to young supporters (See Page 8); and promoting, internally and to the public, a “One Audubon” message.

Cautiously Supportive

Officials at state and chapter offices appear to support Audubon’s moves, but many keep a wait-and-see attitude. Some say, for example, that while the national group’s efforts to coordinate fundraising should benefit all, concerns linger that local donors’ gifts could be cannibalized by the larger group.

Others are concerned that local programs may be in jeopardy if they do not fit into the mold of the new flyway concept or don’t meet new budget requirements imposed by the national office.

In January, the national office closed a land-conservation program in Virginia that was bringing in barely enough money to support itself. Earlier, it merged two chapters in Colorado and Wyoming that had trouble raising money.

It has also dropped a few national programs, including Prescribing Nature for Kids, intended to combat obesity by getting kids active and outside. The program’s goals were considered too far afield from Audubon’s newly tightened focus.

“People are generally giving it the benefit of the doubt—and in California, we are thrilled by so many of the changes,” says Kristi Patterson, a board member of both Audubon California and the National Audubon Society. “But there is some skepticism still around while things are rolling out, and the communication and messaging with local folks needs to improve.”

Officials in the national office say they are particularly sensitive to the issue that has raised the most worry—fundraising—and they have promised to be scrupulous in handling donors and sharing gifts with affiliates. (Together, Audubon and all its affiliates annually have raised roughly $55- to $65-million in recent years, toward a total budget of about $86-million.)

Audubon is testing a new direct-mail solicitation that asks donors to increase their contributions to up to $5,000, sending the appeals to a mix of names identified by state groups and the national office. The state groups can opt to leave certain donors off the list, but 100 percent of gifts from those who are included would go back to the states.

Under a revamped approach to seeking donations of $25,000 or more, Audubon officials say they will carefully spread donor money among affiliates working on efforts relevant to the gifts.

“We now have the framework to pitch a donor who has a summer home in Boston and a winter home in Florida or a donor who is bicoastal and has a general interest in shore birds,” says Kimberly Keller, Audubon’s chief development officer. “We don’t want to move donors away from supporting the special places they have in their heart, but we can now talk to them about the bigger picture and the bigger impact their gifts can have.”

The Audubon Society of Portland, in Oregon, invited Mr. Yarnold to a fundraising house party last fall attended by area birders who travel globally.

Meryl Redisch, executive director in Portland, asked Mr. Yarnold to talk about Audubon’s work nationally and its partnerships with organizations abroad that help migrating birds, such as the Western Sandpiper, which sometimes spend part of the year on the Oregon coast and part in the mudflats of Panama.

The event raised $20,000, Ms. Redisch says, three or four times what might have come in if she and Mr. Yarnold had not introduced the flyway concept. The Portland chapter split the money 50-50 with the national office.

“There’s way too much work that needs to be done for me to be possessive of my donors,” Ms. Redisch says. “National has our donors in their database now, but I don’t think those donors will give any less to us—maybe more now that our conservation work can be looked at in a broader context.”

‘Fewer Boundaries’

Kalman Stein, chief executive officer of EarthShare, which raises money for hundreds of national and local environmental groups, says that kind of big-picture thinking is becoming more common among conservation organizations. Groups that used to focus on preserving one river, for example, are now concerning themselves with issues that affect the entire watershed where that river is located, he says.

“There’s a growing recognition of how completely interconnected we are, how large-scale ecosystems work,” Mr. Stein says. “Audubon is seizing on the opportunity it has to focus on its brand—birds—to bring all its local work, all the dedication and popularity of birding, to scale.”

Mr. Draper, in Florida, says his Delaware Bay epiphany helped ease him into the changes at Audubon, following his initial skepticism. The upgraded services his organization has received from the national office—an improved e-mail system, faster response to legal and personnel questions—are clear benefits, he says. But pulling together all the independent-minded Audubon groups will take some doing.

Previously, the National Audubon Society was viewed, like many other organizations with far-flung affiliates, as if it were “taking resources, not necessarily helping us get our work done,” Mr. Draper says. “That’s changing, and it’ll change if national handles it the right way, because people are getting that it makes sense to look outside our chapters and our states.”

“The local stuff will always be the most important,” he says. “We just need to look at it with fewer boundaries.”