Profile: Conservation International

Austin, Texas-based Convio, an Internet software and services company that works exclusively with nonprofit organizations, is the vendor CI chose to help process this information.

“Most of the donation information — besides the credit card information — is being captured in Convio’s system, where it is permanently stored and initially captured,” Wishrad says. “Indirectly, Convio is storing the information that shows in the grid.”

For all of its campaigns, CI relies on a variety of tools from Convio, including e-mail marketing, fundraising, surveys, widgets, the company’s PageBuilder content management solution and its Convio Connector, which syncs CI’s offline Raiser’s Edge donor database — a Blackbaud product — with Convio’s database.

As a viral component of the campaign, visitors also can participate by becoming ambassadors for change; the site offers ideas for actions such as cutting a square into a T-shirt, mowing a square onto a lawn or creating donuts with square centers to represent lost forests.

Ford — who sits on the board of directors of the environmental organization — even got into the act, having his chest waxed in a square shape in a public service announcement that can be seen on CI’s Web site or YouTube. The PSA will run on both sites until the end of the year.

In fact, the entire campaign will run through the end of the year and include additional phases, although what those phases are is under discussion right now, Wishrad says.

A week after launching, the Ford video had 90,000 hits on YouTube, according to Wishrad, thanks in part to the fact that the star mentioned it when he visited “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” in May to promote “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

But, as of June 5, there were 178,342 views of the PSA on YouTube, according to Wishrad, who explains that “all the views took place after Leno, but not necessarily because of Leno.”