Corel MindManager for World Wildlife Foundation Russia’s fundraising department

World Wildlife Foundation Russia’s fundraising department - working alongside its supporters - is incorporating MindManager's maps and diagrams into its operations. THE CHALLENGE Since a large portion of WWF Russia’s projects are long-term and require stable financial support, systematic work with donors is crucial. For this reason, they have built a complex system of communication for liaising with supporters. It involves using various tools – sometimes in combination – such as: email marketing, telemarketing, SMS and postal marketing, loyalty events and face-to-face meetings. The channel of communication varies depending on the type of support. . For example, the communications with donors who contribute more than 900 roubles per year (individual supporters who receive reports on our projects) differs from the approach take with supporters who donate 100,000 roubles or more annually (members of the Golden Panda Club with whom communication is more personal). Being that WWF is a non-profit organization, efficient finance management is crucial. The mission of the World Wildlife Fund WWF is to stop the degradation of the planet's natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature. Its main goal is to conserve the world’s biological diversity. The WWF's first projects in Russia were initiated in 1988. Later, in 2004, the WWF became a national body of the Russian Federation. Within 20 years, the Fund successfully carried out over 300 field projects in 47 different Russian regions. The Fund now has branches in six priority ecological regions within the country:, the Barents Sea (Murmansk and Arkhangelsk), the Altai-Sayan (Krasnoyarsk), the Northern Caucasus (Krasnodar), the Kamchatka/ Bering Sea (Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy), and the Amur River Basin (Vladivostok) ecoregions. THE SOLUTION Membership Program coordinator Maria Aleshina explains: “MindManager came into our lives at the right time. We had just started introducing a series of important changes into our communication system. Over the previous six months, we incorporated and began actively developing telemarketing. As a result of speaking to our supporters over the phone, we saw a significant increase in the level of financial support we were receiving for conservation projects. So we emailed our supporters information about the project beforehand and then, followed up with a successful conversation with them over the phone. Thereafter we sent a follow-up letter through the post. We had to coordinate all of this with our electronic and paper mailing systems-- making sure everything corresponded to the donations the supporter made, not to mention recording it all in our database. We had to specify a separate internal workflow coordination system for the call-centre (including the duties of the operatives and coordinators, database integration, etc.).” As WWF Russia Fundraising Director Olga Bandalova reports: “MindManager enables us to present this information visually and create a diagram that sets out the sequence for using and combining various communication tools. This helps us to get a fuller, clearer picture and reveals weaker and less effective touchpoints. MindManager’s process description feature is particularly useful during the development phase of new systems or when introducing changes into old ones. The timely detection of problem areas or ineffective channels of communication enables us to optimise workflows promptly and guard against the inefficient use of budget funds.” “Diagrams of ongoing projects created in MindManager-maps save us time and enable us to evaluate the whole picture from all sides in a matter of minutes,” says Eva Bairamova, coordinator of WWF Russia's Earthkeeper Program.  THE RESULT Now, every new process or idea aimed at increasing the efficiency of the way we communicate with our supporters is quickly and easily integrated into our communication system and the division’s operations. Having a clear guide for cooperation between operatives and coordinators means that the organization always has a visual representation of the steps at our fingertips and can avoid dips in efficiency when training new staff. MindManager allowed WWF Russia in a short amount of time to document a new method of communication (telephony) and analyse the effectiveness of each individual channel before integrating it into the day-to-day work of the fundraising department. All of this enables us to attract more funds for WWF Russia’s conservation projects, which work to combat poaching as well as to protect forests, seas and endangered species like the Amur tiger, Amur and Persian leopard, polar bear, Atlantic walrus, European bison, snow leopard and Argali mountain sheep, among others. You can read more about WWF’s work at wwf.ru.