A WILLOWTREE SOCIAL IMPACT PROJECT
Southern Environmental Law Center
Delivering data-driven marketing strategies for audience engagement
The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) has a large and dedicated network of donors and individuals who are invested in its mission to safeguard the environment in the Southeast. With such a wide base of donors and advocates to communicate with, SELC decided to invest in a Customer Data Platform, Segment, to manage its audience data and connect marketing tools to the rest of its techstack. This platform is critical to the organization’s marketing success, and SELC wanted to uncover ways of optimizing the tool. The organization also wished to re-think its marketing automation strategy to more effectively engage their audience, as well as connect with future potential donors.
The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) is a champion of the environment in the Southeast. By forming connections with a network of thousands of passionate donors, SELC is able to raise the funds they need to strengthen environmental protections for states across the Southeast.
Activating A Supporter Base
SELC partnered with WillowTree to provide growth marketing, data analytics, and data analysis services. The Growth Team first analyzed SELC’s growth stack and provided recommendations for a number of new tools that would help them achieve their use cases. The new stack delivers improved cross-channel tracking and the ability to automate messaging based on user behavior.
The WillowTree data science and analytics teams audited SELC’s current data and tagging infrastructure and developed blueprints for a more effective approach. With improved tagging, SELC will be able to measure and track the events on their websites that matter most. This data can now be used to learn what content their supporters are engaged with and how to drive users to action.
With WillowTree’s help, these insights will be more accessible to SELC’s staff, and will be used for more targeted marketing aligned with donors’ interests.
“The WillowTree team provided invaluable guidance and recommendations on growth strategy for a complex set of systems and work. We now have clear direction and understanding of where to focus our efforts in order to utilize important tools and maximize our audience potential.”
Key Takeaways
Marketing should be based on the audience journey
To better engage potential donors, we focused our strategy around the moments and behaviors on their individual “donor journeys” instead of on calendar-based or institutionally-prioritized campaigns that were time-sensitive and non-personalized.
Setting up a data ‘paper trail’ helps keep data useable, actionable, and manageable
To account for the multiple agencies that help SELC with its digital properties, having a clear data taxonomy along with tools and governance standards that prevent unwanted events from being tracked are crucial to the health of the organization’s data.
Investing in the right growth stack is paramount
By leveraging Segment, the CDP that SELC had already invested in, we were able to blueprint what their growth tech stack could look like 1, 2 and 3 years down the road. Choosing the right tools boosts the efficiency of the team, efficiently spends marketing allocatations, and gives SELC full insight into its audience.
Pledge 1%
WillowTree is dedicated to contributing our resources to charities and nonprofits. This project was part of our Pledge 1% commitment, which provides our world class digital services to leading charities and nonprofits at substantially reduced costs.