Sam Ham with a whale-watching guide in Mexico.
Since 1998, Sam Ham, author of Environmental Interpretation: A Practical Guide for People with Big Ideas and Small Budgets, has collaborated with Lindblad Expeditions in strengthening protection of the Galapagos Islands’ natural heritage.
What is Lindblad Expeditions?
Lindblad Expeditions is a long-established, cruise-based travel company. Their biggest vessel holds 80 passengers, and most of them are in the 60- to 65-passenger range. They cruise pretty much all over the world, but their trademark is to go to extraordinary natural and cultural environments.
Lars Lindblad is considered the father, the pioneer, the first adventure cruise operator. He was the first ever to go to Antarctica with tourists, and he believed that adventures could change people, that they were transformative.
How is Lindblad Expeditions involved in protecting the resources of the Galapagos?
Lars is now long passed away, but his son Sven is carrying on this legacy of saving the world. His corporate philosophy is that he makes his livelihood off the special places on Earth, and that if he can deliver an experience that bonds his passengers with those places, they will come to care about them. Sven operates his company and he makes every decision in a way that is consistent with that philosophy. It was this that led him to get in touch with me in 1998.
He had been one of the first actually to operate in the Galapagos archipelago and he was blown away by the place. He developed a fund that he called the Galapagos Conservation Fund, and he set it up to be administered by the Charles Darwin Foundation, the Charles Darwin Research Station, and the Galapagos National Park Service, which is a part of the Ecuadorian National Park Service. He believed that the fund could grow to a size that it could help to pay for protection and conservation projects through donations from his guests.
Among the top priorities is eradication of introduced species, because those islands, like all island ecosystems, are threatened by outsiders that quickly adapt and out-compete the natives who aren’t used to that type of competition. The next thing you know, native and endemic species are extinct. In the Galapagos, 70 percent of the plant and animal species are endemic.
Sven decided that he wanted to do something about that, and he believed that his passengers would want to participate, so he set up this fund to do it. They were raising about $1,800 a week by telling guests on the boats about the fund and asking if they would like to donate to it.
How did your investigations and planning improve Lindblad Expedition’s ability to get guests to better support conservation of Galapagos resources?
My job was to do the research, to identify the messages that they needed to communicate as part of their interpretive program. It’s not fundraising, this is philanthropy. They are different critters. The idea of the interpretive program is to make people care about the place. You do that with powerful thematic interpretation, so the idea was to identify what messages or themes needed to be worked into the interpretive program over the course of a seven-day tour.
I conducted interviews to identify the beliefs that guests had about making a donation to a fund like that. I was interviewing people while snorkeling next to them, swimming between sea lions, and stepping over blue-footed boobies on trails.
After analyzing the data and developing strategic messages, we rolled out a prototype campaign with the slogan, “All Things Lead to the Invitation.” The invitation was nothing more than a photocopied brochure with some text and images. It was placed in the privacy of passenger cabins, so there was no fundraising, no hounding. Guests could decide whether to make a donation to the Galapagos Conservation Fund when they paid their bill—the bar bill, gift shop bill, leaving a gratuity, then the Galapagos Conservation Fund was an option. There was a line that said, “You have already done enough just by being here and coming to love this place, because in the end it will be your love that will matter the most. However, if you want to participate further….”
This is a very special kind of communication because it was aimed at philanthropists. It was aimed at people who were falling in love. This was communication about bonding people to a place and then giving them the opportunity to participate in protecting something they care about. If you can achieve that, they would thank you later for the opportunity. That is the way philanthropy works, as opposed to fundraising.
Were there any surprises in what you found when you did your interviews?
This came up over and over again: One of the key messages is that all eyes are on Galapagos. That is to say, the conservation community worldwide is watching the Galapagos example. There is no place in the world that gets more attention than the Galapagos, and if conservation can’t work there, where can it work?
What was the result of the process?
After I presented the prototype campaign, Sven asked one no-nonsense question that put all of this in its place: “Okay Sam, if we do all of this that you are suggesting, how much will the donations increase?” The guy wanted a figure, and I am thinking, how would I know? Now everybody is looking at me and I bet some of them are thinking, “Glad that is not me, sucker.” I started to mushmouth and kind of had my hand over my mouth, and the next thing I know, “30 percent” came out of my mouth.
When I said that, there was no reaction for a second, and then Sven looks at me and he says, “Okay, 30 percent. That sounds okay, 30 percent.” I took a big sigh of relief. Now 30 percent became a magic number.
Of course, Lindblad carefully monitors donations to the fund, and by the end of the cruising season in December, the donations had increased not by 30 percent, but by 277 percent. It is a great success story.
What kind of impacts has Lindblad been able to achieve with the funds?
Remember, this is all about protecting a place, particularly an island ecosystem threatened mainly by introduced species. Lindblad adopted an island called Santiago Island, one of the islands in the archipelago where virtually all of the companies stop. On Santiago Island, there were thousands of feral goats and pigs. The goats and pigs were taking out the endemic Galapagos tortoise, and this is the tortoise that the islands were actually named after. They browsed on a particular kind of plant, and the goats were eating the plant. The turtles were starving to death.
So, to save the tortoises and to save the turtles, you have to get rid of the pigs and goats. That costs a lot of money. Well, the punctuation mark to the story is that the last goat and pig that were seen was over three years ago.
The total amount raised so far since the inception of the fund is right at $4 million. The total raised in 2007 was over half a million in one year. The total raised as of July 15 this year is $347,000. What is happening is the donations are bigger and, of course, that is a huge credit to the Lindblad staff for finding their stride with the face-to-face communication aspects of the campaign.
