Case Study 2
Midway Albatross: How a Single Instagram Post Became a $750K Campaign

The Situation

Midway Atoll is home to the largest Laysan albatross colony on Earth, and an invasive species eradication project there was short $1 million. The work had a narrow biological window each year. Miss it, and the project didn't just pause, it lost an entire year.

The Origin

Frans Lanting is a National Geographic photographer known for his work with albatross in some of the hardest-to-reach places on the planet. His studio happened to be right next door to Island Conservation's office. Our philanthropy team met with him for a routine update on our work, and he offered something generous but modest: one post to his Instagram audience of over a million followers.

Most people would have said thank you and taken the post. I saw an opening for something bigger.

Making the case internally

I pitched turning a single favor into a full campaign, with Frans as the face of it, an albatross ambassador rather than a one-off endorsement. My peers weren't immediately sold. Their worry was reasonable: asking for more than he'd offered risked the relationship itself. I'd already thought that through. The campaign wasn't built around asking Frans for more work, it was built around giving him a platform he'd actually want to be part of. I put together a presentation making that case directly to him. He agreed.

What I actually asked for was simple: let us film him explaining the project, and post it to his own channels alongside ours.

What I Built

From there, the campaign became mine to construct end to end: script, filming, sound, and edit for the video; a full branding system; a landing page; an SEO strategy; and 15 original pieces of content on Laysan albatross and Midway Atoll conservation. I recruited a scientist willing to write the articles and guided her through making them SEO-strong, then built and published every piece on our site myself. Newsletters, one-pagers, printed materials, and presentations rounded it out.

To stretch the campaign's life as long as possible, I built an editorial calendar with a staggered release: an article would go live on our website, the same story would hit Facebook that same day, LinkedIn the next day, and so on, so the campaign never went quiet even after we'd run out of new stories, about three weeks in.

The Dip, and the Pivot

The campaign opened strong. Two weeks in, momentum started slipping. I spent the following days watching the stats in real time rather than sticking to the original calendar, and changed tactics: instead of staggering posts across platforms, I started pushing them out everywhere at once, saturating specific keywords and phrases across every channel simultaneously.

We also brought in project partners to amplify, and a handful of earned media placements gave the campaign the outside legitimacy that kept it alive past the point where organic momentum alone would have carried it.

The Save

By week six, momentum was nearly gone. That's when I launched the piece I'd been holding in reserve: "Adopt an Albatross." For $50, a donor got a personalized certificate, one I designed myself, bearing the real band number of an actual, individually tracked Laysan albatross on Midway. It turned an abstract cause into something a donor could point to and say "that one is mine."

Three months after the campaign began, the final number came in: $750,000 raised toward the $1M gap.

Beyond Expectations

The SEO strategy outperformed anything I'd projected. I found the scientist who wrote the articles and guided her through making each one SEO-strong, and once published, they rose to the top of search results for "Laysan Albatross," "Midway Atoll," and "Albatross Conservation," outranking CNN, BBC, USFWS, and NPR on those terms. Those rankings held for more than a year after the campaign ended, meaning the strategy I'd designed kept generating visibility and traffic long after the fundraising push was over.