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Case Study 3
The Situation
I arrived at Island Conservation in December 2014 and spent my first weeks running an audit of every communications and marketing tool the organization had. What I found wasn't good. The website was a 2012 site that a contractor had converted into WordPress a couple of years earlier, a visual copy of the old design with none of the underlying strategy rebuilt to match. It was rigid, hard to extend, and the communications team was afraid to touch it. Printed materials were designed by the print shop rather than a professional, which made them inconsistent and expensive. The newsletter had no real structure and ran off an old database. SEO didn't exist. Social media had no strategy behind it. The photography, ironically, was excellent and almost entirely unused.
And there was one problem worse than all of those combined: a misinformation campaign against Island Conservation, run in part by a Huffington Post author who'd started an NGO specifically to discredit us. Google the CEO's name back then, and every result on the first three pages was a detractor.
Island Conservation Website circa December 2014
The Pitch Nobody Wanted
I told leadership the fix was a full rebuild: a new website, a consistent ecosystem across every channel, and a real content strategy behind all of it. They said no. It would take too long, and admitting the current site didn't work would make the department look bad after the money already spent on it.
I built the new site anyway, on my own time, at home. Three weeks later, I showed it to my teammates. They were shocked, then excited, then hesitant, for the same reason leadership had already given me: a new site was an admission the old one had failed. It sat unlaunched for another month while I made the case to get it live.
Island Conservation Website circa September 2015
What I Built Once it Launched
The site itself was only the visible part. Underneath it, I built an entire ecosystem: SEO-optimized original content, a new photography strategy that finally put the existing archive to use, new branding guidelines, a redesigned newsletter that pulled excerpts from website content instead of running as its own disconnected channel, and a rule that every social post from that point forward linked back to the site.
I gave every article a real author byline and bio, specifically to build our own staff into recognized experts rather than an anonymous organization. I ran internal workshops on field photography and content writing so the team could contribute directly. Annual reports, previously outsourced, I designed myself and rebuilt as standalone, SEO-optimized microsites rather than static PDFs.
Every piece of it pointed at the same target: get more people to the site, then get them to the donation tools once they arrive.
The Result Nobody Expected
Within four months, the misinformation that had dominated search results for the CEO's name was buried under factual content we'd published ourselves. That alone changed how leadership saw the project, and it earned me the room to grow the team, eventually to four writers, two project managers who also wrote, and a dedicated media contact by 2017.
The traffic numbers show the growth clearly: from 18,536 annual visitors in 2014 to 38,634 in 2016 as the new ecosystem took hold, then 80,501 in 2017, the same year Google recognized the site as a news outlet.
The final stretch of that growth, 2018 into 2019, looks strong on the chart, but it came during one of the harder periods of my time there. A new CEO joined without the context of how the ecosystem had been built, and budget cuts that followed meant letting go of teammates I'd hired and trained. What kept the numbers climbing wasn't new investment; it was momentum: the reputation, partnerships, and content strategy already in motion carried the organization through a period where the team running it had gotten smaller, not bigger. The chart doesn't show the strain of holding that together with fewer hands, but that's the part I'm proudest of navigating.
Journalists started finding us directly during the growth years, which meant we stopped paying an outside PR consultant. Google's news outlet recognition pushed our own reporting into Google News and compounded everything: more visitors, more earned media, more donations. When a colleague, Nick Holmes, published a significant scientific paper, the ecosystem I'd built was ready to carry it, landing coverage on BBC, BBC Radio 1, and The Guardian, and an infographic from that campaign eventually inspired a board member to write a book, later featured in an exhibit at Science World in Vancouver, using designs I'd created.
By the time Wired found us organically and featured Island Conservation four separate times over the following years, we were being treated like an organization several times our actual budget. That reputation, built almost entirely from a website nobody wanted me to rebuild, is what eventually opened the door to Jonathan Franzen, Frans Lanting, Laura Dern, and, a few years later, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lenovo.
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