Earth Island Institute Logo

Case Study: Earth Island Institute

Positioned for Success

Overview

Client

Earth Island Institute

Industry

Environmental Education and Advocacy

Project

Create an integrated web app, SAAS website builder, complete e-commerce functionality, fund raising, online publishing, and membership management that effectively supported the success of environmentally focused non-profits.

Impact: Support for 275 non-profit organizations and their membership.

Contribution

Business Consulting, Brand Consulting, Product Management, Creative Direction, Graphic Design, UX/UI, Application Development, Project Management, Dedicated Hosting Design and Implementation

Case Study Navigation

Goals

Earth Island Institute (Earth Island) is an incubator and umbrella organization for environmentally focused non-profit projects. Their goal is to support these projects with everything they could possibly need to be successful.

Soup Group is passionate about supporting the betterment of people and our planet and has already worked with other non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the space. This familiarity benefited our early discussions around defining the project and how we could position Earth Island’s projects for success, now and well into the future.

Earth Island’s goal was to create a solution that gave their projects more opportunities to develop successful ventures to support and benefit humanitarianism, conservation, energy, climate, sustainability, and more.

Earth Island’s success would cultivate and nurture increased Conservation, Preservation, Restoration throughout the world. This was David Brower’s vision for the planet.

“Thank you for your continued support and work with Earth Island Institute. Your visionary work on Earth Island’s website is making a real impact on our ability to spread our message and work around the world.”

For Earth’s Sake
– David R. Brower

Soup Group's Solution

Our success was their success, and this was good for humanity and the planet

The answer to realizing Earth Island’s goals would be a phased approach. In the most practical way, we built and integrated a SAAS Content Management System (CMS) with automatic website generation for their new projects that included complete e-commerce capabilities.

To ensure the projects had maximum flexibility, we created tools and functionality for custom branding, creating and managing content, and email marketing. 

The final phase was connecting to Earth Island’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Their bookkeeping and accounting services needed to seamlessly communicate with all of the projects’ e-commerce systems – donations, memberships, and inventory. The Blackbaud Customer Relationship Management (CRM) gave each project the flexibility to administer, communicate with, and share their members.

Earth Island Institute Logo

Phase 1: Branding, SAAS CMS & e-commerce

Build a foundation for growth

Since much of the work that would follow this first phase was undefined, Soup Group wanted and needed to build a solid base for the Earth Island brand, future functionality, and — as much as possible — the unknown.

The brand strategy and corresponding creative work would be the foundation for all design and software development moving forward. Although sometimes it felt like we were overshooting in our strategy and development, our forward-thinking vision proved to be necessary and on target.

The Phase 1 requirement was to build a single CMS-enabled website with e-commerce. To support future website functionality for projects, we modified our D-CAF (Distributed Content Authoring Framework) CMS platform to accommodate SAAS websites and e-commerce for Earth Island’s projects. With this requirement coming soon, being prepared made Phase 2 a much smoother process.

Phase 2: Enabling the SAAS website solution​

Automated websites with e-commerce, member management, and bespoke branding

We pushed Earth Island’s SAAS website generator live. Approved projects had their website created automatically along with the activation of all of the necessary components and functionality. This eliminated IT costs and the time and difficulty of web development for projects. 

Earth Island was instantly a much more attractive and viable solution for environmentally focused non-profit projects.

Components and functionality launched in Phase 2 included:

  • E-commerce with flexible merchandising, donations, and product sales.
  • Membership management.
  • Automated shared usage rights to create flexible memberships across multiple projects.
  • Digital marketing. This was a valuable and highly used tool for projects. From community action alerts to general email marketing and publishing, these invaluable tools helped projects effectively spread their word and extend their reach regionally, nationally, and globally.
  • Automatic integration into Earth Island’s accounting services and CRM. This allowed projects to take advantage of the functionality, efficiencies, and cost savings that these two behind-the-scenes services delivered.

Phase 3: Creating additional efficiencies

Understanding their effectiveness​, inviting action, and simplifying collaboration

In Phase 3 we launched additional functionality for sharing and collaboration that allowed projects to work seamlessly on documents and all of their digital assets. To make it quick, easy, and secure, we integrated all related functionality into the Earth Island project dashboard.

Community Action Alerts and emergency notifications were timely announcements for members to take action. Potential purposes were additional financial support, gathering more people at important events or rallies, and anything that needed immediate attention. We built the alerts upon the email marketing system from Phase 2, which included additional functionality to easily share membership resources, specific actions, and related donations.

Having clarity on their social impact based on their web traffic, website conversions, and email marketing performance, was vital. Easily accessible real-time website reporting by itself is not that interesting, but Soup Group’s version was unique. We designed the system to deliver customized reports so projects could more immediately understand what was working and what needed attention.

Phase 4: Publishing

Publishing for all projects and The Earth Island Journal

The Earth Island Journal is vital to Earth Island’s success. The Journal’s mix of hard-hitting exposés and inspiring stories of grassroots movements for sustainability has won numerous awards through the years. The Journal’s passionate argument for defending the planet has greatly impacted Earth Island’s ability to create exposure, fund projects, and build positive momentum and meaningful impact. The Journal also has a significant effect on the success of projects’ campaigns.

The publishing platform we created allows the Journal’s over 32,000 subscribers to receive it digitally. Previously available only in print, this greatly reduced printing cost and waste. We like to think that the sharp increase in subscriptions, once our solution was launched, had a lot to do with the digital version being available.

Earth Island projects had the same publishing capabilities although it was focused on marketing. With Soup Group’s automated distribution and member sharing capabilities, projects can easily keep existing members and potential members up-to-date and significantly increase their marketing reach.

Results and Nuance

I.T. Efficiency

Each project no longer needed individual web designers and developers. One Earth Island manager could take care of 35 websites, eliminating ~$15,000 per year, per project, in operating costs. Also, with no need for IT and hosting services, the projects’ technology spending was further reduced.

This resulted in a cumulative savings of over $535,000 per year. 

The administration and modification of the project websites are entirely self-service, making email account management, document collaboration, and storage easy and cost-effective. 

Publishing Efficiency

The digital publishing platform developed in Phase 4 allowed Earth Island to grow subscriptions from 18,000 to 32,000.

The original 18,000 subscribers received the print version of the Journal. With the new technology, 40% of Earth Island’s now 32,000 subscribers are online-only subscribers.  

Earth Island CMS - Publishing Efficiency

More Projects

Retention of projects had been a problem for Earth Island, partially due to the cost of their website creation and management. When a project experienced success, the need and cost for Earth Island services was perceived as unnecessary. projects often felt that paying a portion of their donations outweighed the benefit of being part of Earth Island.

Our solution’s efficiencies and cost-savings made Earth Island’s services far more attractive for new and existing projects. Website costs went down by an average of 75% while the functionality and integrated services went up, making project acquisition and retention much easier.

Earth Island Institute Case Study-Connected Projects

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Matters

Early-stage projects invariably have a hard time with their search results, even if they have some SEO savvy. To ensure they had a leg up when launching, Soup Group made sure that projects could leverage Earth Island’s SEO and search results.

By using an Earth Island subdomain, projects benefit from Earth Island’s mature and valuable search equity. Projects can launch using an Earth Island subdomain and once they experience success, transitioning to their own domain name, while retaining current search results, is easy.

Earth Island Institute Case Study-SEO

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