ORGANIZATION: Minnesota Valley Chapter of the Izaak Walton League
WEBSITE: MINNESOTA VALLEY CHAPTER
MISSION STATEMENT: To conserve, restore and promote the sustainable use and enjoyment of our natural resources, including soil, air, woods, waters, and wildlife.
ORGANIZATION’S CHALLENGE:
The Minnesota Valley Chapter of the Izaak Walton League is experiencing technical challenges with their monthly newsletter. Leaders would like support from tech experts to build a new publishing system on WordPress that includes integration, automation, segmenting, and tracking capabilities.
Currently, the organization’s website is Hosted by BlueHost with an Elementor Plugin. Vertical Response is used to distribute newsletters (with a distribution list of 500+), but content is not integrated on the website or social media channels (Facebook and Instagram). Sometimes volunteers manually carry over content but it’s time-consuming and inconsistent. Leaders know that with integrated systems their messaging could reach more people. The current process is also not conducive for the few volunteers managing content with various drafts being created in Google Drive and no clear way to ping the editor for review or send reminders to writers. This creates a bottleneck in the work and limits the number of contributors. Leaders feel that with a modern platform and automation enabled, volunteers could contribute content more easily while working collaboratively. Finally, the same newsletter goes out to all audiences – members, friends of the org, event attendees, artists, conservation supporters, and more. Leaders feel that engagement is low, and people are getting information that doesn’t pertain to them. With a new platform, leaders would like the ability to segment their distribution list and receive a customized digest for each audience type at the end of the month. This would allow them to start targeting communications by interest groups and aid them in their goal of tracking newsletter readership and impact, which is currently not possible. If time allows, leaders would like tech support with the initial set-up of these capabilities. The organization anticipates needing to purchase an additional plugin for the completion of this project but would like to get input from their tech volunteers first.
With a clear plan and tech support to build an integrated publishing system on WordPress, The Minnesota Valley Chapter of the Izaak Walton League can increase volunteer capacity, strengthen visibility in the community, and engage more people in their mission.
POTENTIAL DELIVERABLE(S):
• Integrated publishing system plan & plugin identification
• WordPress platform buildout with automated workflows
• Website & social media integration
• Segmenting and tracking support (if time allows)
REQUESTED VOLUNTEER SKILL SETS: Solution Architecture, Software Development, User Design Experience (UX), Web Development, WordPress expertise
These spots are for the 2-3 Pro Bono Consultants - Pro bono consultants give their time and expertise to the challenge, supporting the nonprofit and team in finding a solution to the challenge and working toward the agreed upon deliverable.
