Oceana Case Study

Founded in 2001, Oceana is a global advocacy group pursuing policy changes that will reduce ocean pollution and prevent the irreversible collapse of fish populations, marine mammals and other sea life.

Oceana began using DemocracyInAction (DIA) at the beginning of 2005 with a database of approximately 250,000 supporters. As adherents themselves of open source technology, Oceana’s team wanted the flexibility of an open platform that could grow and expand with them and integrate with other online and offline systems.

They also wanted to integrate their international programs, with a database that could support multilingual characters.

And they wanted to do all of this while cutting their budget for an online CRM and investing the savings in the staff and strategies to make it all work. They chose to migrate from the now-defunct GetActive system onto DIA’s online organizing platform.

Since then, Oceana has used DIA’s online organizing platform in creative and fun ways to engage their supporters and build their list to nearly 500,000, encompassing North America, South America, Central America and Europe. They’ve pushed the envelope in advocacy, fundraising, and in building lasting relationships with their supporters.

Supporters Respond Well to Fun!

Three Halloweens ago, Oceana came up with a brilliant idea – while Halloween isn’t a holiday one would use for fundraising, why not use it to engage supporters and have a little fun? Thus was born the Freaky Fish campaign. Freaky Fish was a campaign for supporter acquisition and engagement, timed to lead into holiday/end-of-year fundraising. The most effective part of the campaign was having good content, of course, but it was DIA’s postcard tool that allowed Oceana to promote the contest within their list and beyond.

Using Claire Nouvian’s book The Deep, Oceana identified thirteen really freaky-looking fish, like this Hairy Angler:

Then, they challenged their supporters to nominate the Freakiest Fish. As an incentive, they offered a copy of The Deep as a raffle prize, along with tickets to the IMAX film Under the Sea.

Promoting the Contest

Oceana used Salsa’s Email Blast features to promote the contest and the query tool to tally the votes. To allow users to select a fish, they created a custom Radio field for use in their sign-up page.

Imaginative Content Items

The voting page used a customized signup form with JavaScript and CSS to format the page. (Oceana recommends finding someone fluent in HTML, JavaScript and CSS for taking full advantage of Salsa’s customizability.)

To optimize email collection, they included the sign-up form for participants to enter an email address to be notified of any prize winnings.

E-Cards Attract New Supporters

Using Salsa’s E-Cards feature, Oceana developed in-house four postcards with licensed pictures of the freaky fish from The Deep, branded with a custom orange-and-black template.

Salsa Continues to help Oceana Thrive

Beyond the freaky fish project, Oceana makes extensive use of Salsa Storefronts, Peer-to-Peer Fundraising pages, donation pages, Advocacy Campaigns, and Tell-A-Friend Pages.

In 2008, after years of continued online growth, Oceana moved to a dedicated Salsa "Node". The Node, a server cluster dedicated to an individual large organization, gives Oceana the freedom to run advanced queries and reports on their own to gain valuable insight into their 500,000 supporters and further refine messaging and targeting. The Node also allows them to continue to grow without having to worry about shared resources or system speed. They’re able to develop their own custom applications and enhancements on top of the Salsa platform – giving them all the flexibility they need to continue to inspire action and grow.