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Pacific Wild focuses on what matters with monday.com
About Pacific Wild
Pacific Wild is a charity based in British Columbia that is leading the charge for wildlife conservation on the west coast of Canada. It aims to inspire and motivate citizens worldwide to support greater protection of threatened and endangered species and ecosystems, focusing its work on science-based research and community outreach through engaging visual storytelling.
Pacific Wild founded the campaign to protect the Great Bear Rainforest, which resulted in one of the largest rainforest protection agreements to date. It was also involved in the ban on trophy hunting grizzly bears. The organisation continues to work toward large-scale protection of marine and rainforest areas, along with the protection of keystone species such as bears, wolves, and wild salmon.
Industry: Nonprofit
Headquarters: Victoria, British Columbia
Results at a glance
Time saving: 20% reduction in time spent searching for updates
Improved collaboration: Increased alignment of concurrent and linked projects
Improved visibility: Central visibility of project statuses and blockers
Clearer tracking: Straightforward tracking of creative requests
Efficient processes: Streamlined communication, feedback, and sign-off processes
Improved teamworking: Reduced confusion and frustration
The challenge
Pacific Wild has a small core team, like many nonprofits, but also receives grants to provide placements for students during the summer, so the team size fluctuates throughout the year. They're usually running up to 20 projects adjacently, and with some team members fully remote, others in-office, and a need to quickly onboard new starters, there's no doubt that effective work management and streamlined communication are essential to keep things running smoothly.
However, an unwieldy combination of different platforms used to communicate, track projects, provide feedback and approval, and record where assets were stored created confusion, a lack of version control, and time lost to searching for updates.
Some of the team had already proposed monday.com as a solution and begun setting it up, but without the time or in-depth knowledge to dedicate to configuration and training, buy-in was limited, and people continued to work in their existing channels. Keen to see if a properly configured monday.com setup could solve their problems, the Pacific Wild team contacted Adaptavist, and we began working with Project Director Natasha Wehn.
We tried to use tutorials to do the setup ourselves, but there are so many options on monday.com, and it is so customisable that we found it difficult to know where to start. We don't really have a tech team—like a lot of nonprofits, everyone wears many hats! We really just needed someone to come in who could get it right for us.
Natasha Wehn
Project Director
The solution
As monday.com Advanced Delivery Partners, we created a bespoke monday.com work management solution that incorporated everything the Pacific Wild team needed to organise and manage campaigns. We began by digging into the day-to-day details of what Pacific Wild does and how the team works to truly understand their goals and where things might be going wrong or causing difficulty.
A particular requirement highlighted was the need to link and automate different campaign items and monday.com boards so that if an update were made in one place, it would be automatically reflected in all the other relevant places across monday.com. This automation was implemented to save a huge amount of manual searching and remove the need for team members to repeat themselves in multiple places when making changes and giving feedback.
We also identified several opportunities to build integrations with the other systems the team was using, like bringing in days or weeks of significance for campaigns from their Google Calendars, for example, International Wolf Day. We ensured robust synchronisation between monday.com and their relevant Slack channels and email threads, keeping updates live, in sync, and feeding into conversations that were already happening.
Finally, the Pacific Wild team could start using monday.com forms for creative requests, further building on the new ways of working that we implemented for them and ensuring that all work now flows through the monday.com system, where it is tracked, correctly assigned, and updated at every stage.
Adaptavist really listened to us explain where we were at. It can be difficult to know what you need if you are very new or not technical, so it was really great to have the Adaptavist team translate our frustrations into a plan.
Natasha Wehn
Project Director
Boosting efficiency to focus on what matters
From a history of tool fatigue and technical issues leading to low buy-in for any new system introduced, we created a framework that the Pacific Wild team had confidence in using and found both reliable and enjoyable. With a marked improvement in work management, they have freed up time and resources to dedicate directly to their campaigns and have, therefore, been able to scale up their operations. They're excited about the future possibilities, particularly commenting on how highly customisable and flexible the monday.com platform is.
As Natasha says: 'I can see so much opportunity with the monday.com platform, and I'm excited to take a breath and dive into it a little bit more now that I've seen some of the options that are possible; I feel like we can really take it to the next level. I want to explore some of the new integrations and automations that have become available since we started working together. It feels like a giant universe, and we're only looking at one tiny star!'
The team has also expressed interest in evaluating how their various fundraising platforms could be streamlined and integrated with monday.com, boosting their reach and opening up the potential for the donations they receive to have an even greater impact.
Finally, Natasha shared some glowing feedback for the Adaptavist project team:
I would definitely recommend Adaptavist to others … The interest you showed in our campaigns was so nice to see—sometimes, we forget that not everybody is so deeply entrenched in what we do! Everyone on the Adaptavist team was so friendly and welcoming but also understanding and patient with us. Our timelines have shifted a lot, and there have sometimes been long gaps between when we've been able to meet, so it's been really lovely to work with a team that's been so accommodating… It has felt like a support that we can lean on.
Natasha Wehn
Project Director