We like the Audubon Society, the publications they produce, and of course, the artist himself. Over the last half decade, a new CEO for the Society has rewritten their strategic plan and seen overwhelming success in involvement of all sorts. Elsa Wenzel interviewed this CEO, David Yarnold, for GreenBiz:

The Audubon Society appears to be doing everything right in social media and marketing. It’s got apps, maps, a buzz on social media, an engaging website and a funny blog. It’s hip to crowdsourcing and citizen science: In just one weekend, 163,000 of its volunteers recorded on smartphones their sightings of more than 5,000 bird species. Audubon said its digital platforms reach a million people, a staggering climb from just 35,000 a couple of years ago.

Much credit for this goes to David Yarnold, CEO and president. He joined Audubon in 2010 after a long career in journalism at the Pulitzer-winning San Jose Mercury News, and a stint as president at the Environmental Defense Fund.

When he started, Audubon had hundreds of chapters and no strategic plan. Yarnold was able to see that as an opportunity. Using the language of someone well-versed in Silicon Valley metaphors, he explained.

Elsa Wenzel: How was Audubon “broken” when you came onboard?

David Yarnold: We’re 111 years old and there was good work being done at our 463 chapters and at our 23 state offices. But it wasn’t aligned around a vision. … Audubon had strayed from its core values and its mission and had not taken advantage of technology. …Audubon hadn’t had a staff-written strategic plan for more than two decades before we wrote one in 2010.

Audubon had this amazing distributed network that had been viewed as a burden and a nuisance, because Audubon’s structure is a pre-internet structure of a series of almost freestanding state offices and chapters. … But really in an internet-rich era, a distributed network was a gift.

All we had to do was to fire up that base with a shared vision.

Wenzel: Step me through how you established the vision and then how you got people fired up, what kinds of tools you used, for example?

Yarnold: So in search of that vision, I spent my first month on the road. I went down the Mississippi, up the Atlantic, down the Pacific to Mexico, and I just listened to people tell me the story about Audubon. And they told me the story about the four superhighways in the sky that go up and down the U.S., the Pacific, Central, Mississippi and Atlantic flyways they’re called. …

Underneath these superhighways there are rest stops and homes for migratory and non-migratory birds. And there are 2,700 places that we call important bird areas, and they are America’s network of biodiversity, and our job is to protect the tipping points.

And so I learned that story and I synthesized that story; I did what any reporter would do. … And then when we went to do a strategic plan in 2010, instead of starting with a whiteboard we started with a hypothesis around the flyways of the Americas. We adopted this strategic plan with a set of conservation priorities.

What happened that was magical was that everybody in Audubon, whether they were a chapter in Lexington or Wenatchee or San Diego or Tallahassee or a state office or a nature center, everybody saw themselves in that strategic plan. They knew that their ruby-throated hummingbirds were connected to South America. They knew that their shorebirds migrated from the Arctic down to Chile.

First of all, people have a tremendous sense of ownership and connection, an emotional connection to birds. And so the flyways were a way for people to connect with something larger than themselves. That’s a deep human yearning and that also talks to the way people who love birds think about birds, that they’re travelers and that they’re heroic. And so the flyways vision worked way better than we had any expectation that it would.

By bringing on technology through one of our key partners, the Environmental Systems Research Institute … by using their data, we were able to look at the most important places to preserve for birds.

And what that did was it gave us a scientifically valid look at a much larger landscape than the artificial boundaries that state boundaries create. … By following science and by following the data, we were able to begin to overcome some of the silos that had grown up over a period decades.

Wenzel: Now the Audubon Society — when you think of … stereotypes or images associated with people involved, you might think of older folks in tennis shoes and librarian types …

Yarnold: Floppy hats.

Wenzel: You have this great history of citizen science that maybe wasn’t called that.

Yarnold: Yeah, we’ve been crowdsourcing data for 110 years. We operate the longest running, largest animal census on the planet, the Christmas bird count, and millions of people have taken part in it. Audubon was at its formation a social network; it was created by primarily women in the Northeast and the Southeast who wanted to stop the slaughter of birds for their feathers for hats. …

Most important is when you look at our metrics, people spend three times as much time on our social media sites as on average. So we don’t just go for quantity, we go for quality of engagement.

Read the rest of the interview here.