Cornell Lab Gives Bird Lovers Free Tools— in Exchange for Their Email Addresses

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s popular website, allaboutbirds.org, which provides information about nearly 600 species, attracts plenty of visitors. Many of them, though, fly away without a trace.

To capture more potential donors, the group two years ago started to direct people to information they might like to download and also began to ask for email addresses in exchange for some of that content, like a bird-identification guide or sound files of bird calls.

Since then, the Cornell Lab has increased the number of email addresses it has collected by 52 percent. With more people to contact, its revenue from online donations, which doubled to more than $1-million from 2012 to 2013, has risen again so far this year by 47 percent.

“We knew we had to take better advantage of traffic, turning anonymous visitors into email addresses, then teaching them about the lab, so they have the opportunities to learn with us and support us,” says Nicola Leckie, online marketing manager at the Cornell Lab.

The organization expanded on that idea in January with the introduction of its new bird-identification cellphone app, called Merlin. Ms. Leckie says that similar apps might cost up to $20, but her group decided to give Merlin away free. After a trial period, people were asked simply to give their email addresses to continue.

In April, the last time the organization kept count, 63 percent of the roughly 63,000 app users at the time represented new email addresses to the organization’s database.

The latest online effort, to capture interest in this summer’s bird-nesting season, offers instructions on how people can build nests for different species.

“We are always looking for unique content we can share and that people would want to share their email addresses with us to get,” Ms. Leckie says.