In March, the National Wildlife Federation will travel to New Orleans to conduct its annual meeting—an event where the location will serve as the exclamation point to the organization’s overriding message.

Federation president and CEO Larry Schweiger said New Orleans serves as the perfect example of why this nation must restore its eroding coastlines and take immediate action to address global climate change. “Hurricane Katrina shows us you can’t heat up places like the Gulf of Mexico without having these intense storms,” he said.

Schweiger, who took over as chief executive of the 70-year-old organization in 2004, is working to re-energize the National Wildlife Federation by integrating business lines and focusing on the hot-button topic of global climate change to generate interest, involvement, and funding.

“The cause we’re advancing, with much greater timeliness, is that global climate change is real,” Schweiger said. “Its effect isn’t just on wildlife. Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma have woken people up to the fact that you can’t heat up your oceans without more intense storms. It’s resulted in a more aware, concerned public that is willing to give more to the organization to advance solutions.”

Integrated approach
When Schweiger took the president’s chair in 2004, he found the organization wasn’t using all of its resources efficiently. “NWF had, for a long time, been operating in separate units. Our magazines for example, Ranger Rick, National Wildlife, Your Big Back Yard, and Wild Animal Baby, were not integrated in our marketing efforts. We’re now moving to reach across the various business units. We’re promoting our children’s publications in our adult publications and vice versa. It seems like a simple thing to do, but we were missing value there. It’s now a more thoughtful, integrated marketing approach.”

NWF also operated two separate Web sites— the Federation’s main site, nwf.org, as well as Enature.com, a resource with field guides to over 5,000 species.. The organization was able to combine the Web sites and create substantial savings. “We integrated a number of our business units,” he said. “We did several things to tighten up operations to get revenues up and expenses down, and it’s worked well for us.”

Multi-level effort
The new chief executive also discovered that the organization had become flat in regard to fundraising. While most charitable organizations rely on major gifts from corporate sponsors, NWF was focused on its individual members for contributions.

“We’re working on a program to get those major donors to give net dollars to the organization,” Schweiger said, noting the organization is championing the cause of global climate change to generate interest. “As we expand our vision, we’re going to see more business leaders wanting to work with us because they’ve recognized this issue is more important than ever. The up-tick of Americans concerned about climate change and the impacts of global warming on their future is dramatic. We have the opportunity to work together with business leaders to help address these human concerns and send a signal that we are socially responsible and taking steps to do the right things.”

At the grass-roots level, NWF is using its EnviroAction monthly news digest and electronic Action Alerts to engage individual members. The underlying message, Schweiger said, is that time is short. “We’re letting people know that we simply can’t afford to have another 30 years where a trillion tons of carbon is pumped into the atmosphere.”

In Washington, NWF’s Office of Federal and International Affairs is working to develop effective conservation policies and laws to address global climate change. The group supports the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act proposed by Senators Joseph Lieberman and John McCain, which would create an economy-wide cap-and-trade system to control emissions of greenhouse gases and encourage innovation for reducing them.

Schweiger is also the co-chair of the Climate Change Committee, which involves a number of environmental groups, and said the drive is to reach out to all constituency groups to get them involved. “Global warming is not an environmental issue, it’s a profound societal issue,” he said. “If we don’t extend our reach to generate involvement, we’ll fail to change our nation’s—and the world’s—energy future.”

Call to action
NWF’s annual meeting in New Orleans in March will serve as the springboard that launches the revitalized organization’s focused effort. Schweiger said the devastated southern city serve ass the ultimate example of why the nation needs to work to restore its coastal buffer zones, reform and redirect the US Army Corps of Engineers, and take action to confront global warming.

“We have an opportunity to use our annual meeting to make that point in a very clear way. We need to advance an agenda that is beneficial to all of our children and grandchildren because we want to make sure the next generation inherits a world where our communities, our wildlife, and wild places can thrive.”