Alison Hermance, Communications Manager, WildCare Bay Area

You should be careful what you ask the Internet for. We asked for hand knitted nests and got thousands. Only a few are shown here.

At the beginning of 2014, we were working with Alison and the marketing staff of WildCare on ideas to raise awareness of Baby Bird Season.   Every spring there is an influx of orphaned baby birds whose parents have been killed or permanently separated from them.  Baby birds take a tremendous amount of work because they have to be fed around the clock every forty five minutes during their waking hours.  The bird ward at WildCare has 3-5 people in it all day, and each cage actually has a kitchen timer on it.  When the last bird in the room is fed at the forty five minute mark, the timer on the first cage goes off and its starts all over again.  It’s a lot of work and a lot of money to take care of these animals and send them back into the wild.

As we were throwing around ideas of how to more fully engage the public in the campaign, Alison brought up that we might consider asking for hand knitted or crocheted nests to keep the baby birds in instead of the cardboard boxes that they have used in the past.  We liked this idea because it gave people a meaningful way to participate in the care of the birds, and it avoided the very tired technique of simply asking people for money again.  We are all supporters of nonprofits, and everyone gets tired of being asked for money.

We thought that some people who sent us nests would probably send us money to help us with our bird food bill too, just out of kindness.  We went off and studied the potential audiences for the campaign, and figured out how to approach them, what WildCare would need to bring to the table, and how to sufficiently show their gratitude.

We launched the campaign, and it did really well.   We received tons of nests for the WildCare bird room, and used the overflow of nests to supply bird rooms all over the country.  WildCare’s work for baby birds is primarily regional in nature, but we received national media attention for our work.

Alison Hermance was glowing in her praise of our work: “The national success of this campaign, and the addition of hundreds of new donors to our system is a direct result of the Cause Stories’ team strategy.  They identified an audience we weren’t aware of, and figured out how to position WildCare as a national leader on baby bird rehab, and helped us execute it flawlessly.  My phone was ringing off the hook with media and public inquiries about the campaign for weeks.”

We loved working with Alison on this project.  She’s an excellent evangelist for the organization with expertise in wildlife rehabilitation and media relations.   She was able to take advantage of the media opportunities this campaign created, and that propelled it into a national phenomenon.

The campaign was covered by NBC Nightly News, the San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post,KPIX Channel 5 News, KTVU Channel 2 News, the Marin Independent Journal, and dozens of other television stations, independent blogs and websites.  You can watch a clip from the NBC Nightly News here:

You would not believe how many packages we opened during this project. And even though it’s over, crafted nests (and the occasional check) keep coming!