THINKeEXTENSION

The Nature Conservancy is an organisation with conservation activities worldwide. They are good at conservation, they are good at fund raising, and as it happens they are quite good at eExtension. I was interested to read an article on their site entitled Big Ideas in Conservation – Harnessing Information Technology. The article was in a section called “Next Big Ideas in Conservation“, and was written by the Director of Emerging Strategies, Jonathan Hoekstra. Hoekstra points to a realisation in a jungle in Borneo as a moment of understanding the possibilities for IT to influence conservation.

Best Practice eExtension

Let’s for a moment examine how the Nature Conservancy are using technology in their extension efforts and compare that with what might be considered Best Practice eExtension. The Nature Conservancy website

• has an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed of news items
• Allows visitors to respond
• Makes good use of multimedia including photos and slideshows
• Uses video including a Public Service Announcement video that is hosted on an external network Google Video
• Uses Audio podcasts distributed by an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed
• Uses Email capture to convert visitors into contacts
• Associate Director Digital Marketing, Jonathon Colman @jcolman regularly uses microblogging application Twitter to drive traffic to Nature Conservancy

All great eExtension practices!

Nature Conservancy PSA on Google Video

Using a video sharing network to host your online video is smart for at least 5 reasons.

1. If the video becomes popular someone else pays for the bandwidth.
2. Your video will receive traffic from your website and your website will receive traffic from the video sharing network.
3. If you put a link to your site in the video description you will build a high value incoming link to your site which is important for search engines.
4. People can embed your video on other sites like I have just done with this video building more exposure and traffic for your site.
5. Via the video sharing site people can comment and respond to your video

What’s Missing?

Well it’s hard to be critical of an organisation and a site that doing so much so well. One important component of a smart eExtension strategy is to choose tools and a workflow that suit your organisation’s goals and resources. The enhancements I am about to suggest are components of an optimal eExtension strategy in an organisation with unlimited goals and resources. Knowing the good work that Jonathon does, I’m sure he and his team may have considered or are working these additions.

• Incorporation of a blog technology particularly with the ability for people to comment and respond to individual articles
• Use of a social media aggregation service such as friendfeed to put all Nature Conservancy online content in one place.
• Nature Conservancy has a facebook not for profit page with almost 8000 fans. I would love to know why it’s not more prominent on the website, probably a good reason for this

All in all  Nature Conservancy  is an awesome website, which is being done very well. Testimony to this is it’s ranking by Alexa (an internet traffic ranking site similar to Neilsen’s rating of TV shows) as being in the top 0.14% of sites worldwide and the number of incoming links 450,720 which means lots of other websites are linking to it (good for search engines and traffic). For eExtension Best Practice I would give Nature Conservancy an A to and A+, mind you on the same criteria THINKeEXTENSION is in the C+ to B- zone.

What are your thoughts? What do you like about the Nature Conservancy website? Or what features do you think makes a A+ eExtension site?

Tags: eExtension, ConservationWebsite, NatureConservancy, eExtensionStrategy,