In the summer of 2021, on an expedition off the coast of Massachusetts, Avery McAlhany met a Great White Shark for the first time—a 6-foot-5-inch juvenile named Santiago.
Since then, she has joined several expeditions, watching from the deck as marine scientists sample, tag, and release the sharks in a bid to better understand these incredible ocean giants.
“It's very emotional to see an animal like that, just right there, up close. They’re magnificent. It's made me cry a few times,” she says.
With a background in graphic design, Avery didn't set out to work for an ocean research nonprofit, but she recalls being fascinated by sharks since a young age. Now, she’s a Content Specialist on the marketing team at OCEARCH where she wears many hats - including email marketing and managing their CRM.
The mission: Introducing OCEARCH
OCEARCH (pronounced ‘oh search’) is a global nonprofit that researches sharks, particularly the population of Great White Sharks that live off the East Coast of the United States.
They run scientific expeditions, where teams of 10-20 people go out on their mothership vessel to sample, tag, and release sharks. They can then be tracked via OCEARCH’s innovative Shark Tracker app. This aids various research projects in better understanding and advocating for the species and promoting ocean conservation.
The organization’s ultimate aim is to bring the oceans back into balance and abundance.
Sharks are apex predators - they play an essential role in keeping marine ecosystems in balance. But many species, such as Great White Sharks, are classified as vulnerable, putting the oceans under threat. OCEARCH collaborates with scientists from other conservation and research groups, and they make their data available via Open Source.
"People are fascinated and often afraid of sharks. OCEARCH has a huge following on social media and through numerous TV shows. They uses that fascination and reach to build better understand of sharks, and the need for their protection," says Bob Breck, a co-founder of Benevolent Tech, who served as OCEARCH's Head of Development.
With just 13 staff, this is a nonprofit that is small in size but large in scope and scale. But like many nonprofits, they have limited resources.
The challenge: tech was not fit for purpose
Bob first started working with OCEARCH when he was an independent consultant to support their fundraising strategy and scale donations from individuals.
Through that work, it was clear OCEARCH’s tech stack was holding them back.
They had been using Salesforce for several years and they found it very difficult to use - the platform was not intuitive and not tailored to their nonprofit use case. Avery was struggling to use the platform with no training and no experts available for support.
Their email platform, Pardot (now named “Marketing Cloud Account Engagement”), was also causing problems: it didn’t have a quick and easy way to personalize and segment emails without editing lines of code.
“It just wasn't intuitive. It was very industrialized. You couldn't personalize it,” explains Avery: “It had a lot of HTML and CSS code needed to create some of the emails, which I can do a little bit of those things … but I am in no way a coder or back-end developer at all. And so that made it very difficult to send emails every week. It was very time-consuming.”
Around that time, Benevolent Tech was being founded by a group of nonprofit and tech veterans, with the aim of helping mission-driven (or ‘benevolent’) organizations become more impactful by harnessing technology.
And so, OCEARCH became one of Benevolent Tech’s first clients, kicking off in late 2023.
The project: Successful migration to HubSpot
After evaluating other CRM systems, OCEARCH made the decision to move over to HubSpot for a more flexible, powerful and user-friendly solution to their marketing tech.
Avery recalls feeling a little daunted by making such a big change, as the platform held their entire audience base. But she was also excited to get a better solution and trusted Benevolent Tech to steward the process.
The project involved:
“I was surprised it didn’t take longer,” said Bob, “we thought it would take 6 to 8 months, but it ended up being completed within 4 months. There was a lot of data to move over, but it was a very accelerated timeline.”
For Bob, the highlights of the project were seeing Avery and her team find a tool that they genuinely enjoyed using and being part of OCEARCH’s inspiring mission to restore the oceans.
The results: Better tools and training led to more email signups
Full onboarding with intuitive tools
After switching to HubSpot, Avery was relieved by how intuitive the platform interface was and how much easier and smoother it was to use. HubSpot also has a wealth of resources online to show users how to take best advantage of its features.
But it was the training and support from Benevolent Tech that made the biggest difference to Avery.
“Sometimes it can feel like you’re alone, just working at home when you’re stuck on something… But all I had to do was send an email to Brian, and he would email me back within 30 minutes with a solution,” she says, describing the Benevolent Tech team as ‘lifesavers’ and ‘mentors’.
She particularly valued the working sessions with Michele Anderson, Senior Consultant at Benevolent Tech, “where she'd share her screen and walk me through different things. And we kind of figure things out together sometimes. And I love learning that way. I definitely feel more fulfilled and more confident.”
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform, and using it for email marketing allowed for more sophisticated personalization and segmenting of their audience lists - no coding required.
For Avery, the support from Benevolent Tech and the smoother and more powerful tools have helped her feel less stressed, more efficient, and more fulfilled with her work.
She says: “They've just helped me with literally anything and everything in a very timely manner, which has relieved a lot of stress on my end so I could do my job more efficiently. … They're kind and very knowledgeable and just can't say enough good things about them!”
New fundraising tool helped increase email signups and impact
Even better, the project helped OCEARCH increase its email signups.
Shortly after the migration was complete, OCEARCH kicked off its “Meet a Shark” Sweepstakes 2024 campaign, its biggest fundraiser of the year.
During that campaign, OCEARCH recorded 41,428 new additions to its email list via both free entry and donation entry to the Sweepstakes. This was a massive 189% increase from the 2023 campaign, which had 14,339 in email growth.
Most of the increase came from a major boost in free entries. Avery puts this down to having more user-friendly signup forms through HubSpot.
And, of course, more email subscribers leads to more widespread support, donations, and impact.
By growing its supporter base, OCEARCH has more opportunities to fund its scientific expeditions to study the sharks, facilitating research and advocacy of this ecologically critical but often misunderstood keystone species. All to help restore balance to our oceans.
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Benevolent Tech is a human-centered consulting and product firm that provides team and technology alignment consulting, data optimization, HubSpot implementation and onboarding, and custom development services to benevolence-creating nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Want to work with us? Let's chat!
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