This past summer, the ORTEC Americas Data Science and Consulting team completed a pro bono project with the Marine Conservation Institute (MCI) to understand the organization’s donor and social media follower base using analytical tools.
MCI is a nonprofit organization that works to protect and restore marine biodiversity. Marine Conservation Institute is dedicated to securing permanent, strong protection for the oceans' most important places — for us and future generations.
To meet this mission, MCI advocates solutions for biodiversity protection. Its Blue Parks Initiatives incentivizes ocean protection globally in the face of climate change and heightening human impact and their Marine Protection Atlas tracks and qualifies progress toward global protection.
Donations are essential to its goal of protecting oceans, and more donations means greater protection power. To grow donations, it is important to first understand the people who are already donating.
For the project, data from social media platforms and donation information were brought together to highlight demographics and donation behaviors across MCI’s various social media platforms. With this analysis, MCI will better understand the overlap of users across different platforms​, draw insights into the types of donors engaging on each platform​, and better select demographic groups to focus on for growing donor base and followers​. As a result, MCI is further empowered to achieve more frequent and larger donations and better protect our blue planet.
“Our community of ocean-lovers is at the heart of the work we do. ORTEC’s help in understanding the demographics and behaviors of our supporters has enabled us to be more thoughtful and more impactful in how we garner support, so that we can do the greatest good for the ocean,” said Lance Morgan, CEO, MCI.
ORTEC is also proud to have worked with MCI.
“Working with MCI has been a great experience. It has been really rewarding to leverage our analytical skills to help protect our oceans,” said Nienke Wagenaar, senior consultant at ORTEC.
Find out more about ocean protection at marine-conservation.org. Donations can be sent to the Marine Conservation Institute here.
Improving the planet is a passion at ORTEC — which is why ORTEC Americas Data Science and Consulting team could not pass up the opportunity to support the Marine Conservation Institute with helping protect our planet using data. Read the below article to learn more.
