Google boosts Conservation charity

Press Release dated: Tuesday, April 01, 2003

World Land Trust Googles to Success

During the past six months the World Land Trust has invested in developing its Internet marketing, in particular using Google Advertising. And this has resulted in the most successful fundraising campaign the Trust has ever achieved in the first quarter of a year. Donations through the secure server have ranged from £25 to £1000.

Over the 14 years of it existence, the months of January and February have always been the slackest, with very few new donations. But this year, thanks to the Internet, that trend was been dramatically reversed.

A young zoology graduate, Peter Taylor, joined the World Land Trust staff last summer to develop the Trust's web activities. While he was studying at Liverpool University, Peter had taken a strong interest in web design and under his guidance, by Christmas, a record number of new supporters had been recruited for the Trust's projects. According to Peter "The great thing about the WLT is that it has had some incredible successes, and there was lots of good news - it was largely a case of getting that information out to the wider world. The Internet is an ideal way of communicating extremely cheaply to a huge audience."

Although the Internet is often derided as a place for advertising, the success of the WLT does show that if there is an enormous potential. Peter went on to say "The success at one time nearly created problems, in as much as our server could barely cope with the volume of traffic. However, we have now had a series of upgrades, and we can now do fully automated online donations, in almost any currency."

As part of its Internet development, the World Land Trust's eBulletin was launched, and at the beginning of March the 1000th subscriber signed up on the web. According to Peter Taylor "This is a great step forward because many of our supporters are rightly concerned about receiving paper newsletters, and they also cost a lot in postage. While at the moment we are still sending out two conventional newsletters a year, we are now aiming to get out monthly eBulletins. These cost next to nothing in terms of resources, but mean we can keep our supporters full informed with all recent developments. And we are happy to send it to anyone interested, not just donors, because it does not cost anything extra."

The World Land Trust has projects involved with creating wildlife reserves in Patagonia, Belize, The Philippines and Ecuador. Its next web development plans to install webcams in some of its reserves, so that the wildlife can be observed all over the world

For more information, contact: John Burton
CEO
World Land Trust
jab*at*worldlandtrust.org (To avoid spam, we cannot show the email address in full. Please replace *at* with the symbol @ in your email address field.)
Web site: http://www.worldlandtrust.org

 
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