“Business as usual” has never been our style at ONE/Northwest. As a mission-driven provider of technology to the environmental movement, we’re all about questioning the way things have always been done.

In 2006, ONE/Northwest’s board and staff turned that questioning back on ourselves with an intensive strategic-planning effort aimed at understanding how our work needs to change over the next decade.

Historical Context

ONE/Northwest arrived on the scene in 1995 at a time when many environmental organizations were falling behind in the technology revolution. We concentrated where environmental groups needed us most: installing computers and computer networks. By 2001, these organizations’ needs had evolved significantly. We responded with new services to provide them with websites, email newsletters, databases, and collaboration tools.

Why Change?

Demand for these new services remains extremely strong today. Walk through our offices on any given day and you feel the buzz of the ONE/Northwest staff working on dozens of projects addressing a wide range of important environmental issues. Over the last two and a half years, we’ve completed over 100 websites. By most measures of a technology consulting business, we are quite successful.

But are we really? As a mission-driven organization, ONE/Northwest has a higher standard for evaluation; namely, are our technology services really helping efforts to protect the environment? In 2006, we used our strategic planning to try to answer that question. We clarified our mission, how we impact it, and how we measure our impact.

Influencing Decisions

Policy makers, business leaders, and individual people make decisions every day that have a profound impact on our natural environment. The ability to influence these decisions is the ultimate measure of the environmental community’s effectiveness.

Increasing the environmental movement’s influence is ONE/Northwest’s primary purpose. In the decade ahead, we will focus all of our resources on using technology and other innovative approaches to increase environmental advocates’ influence on public- and private-sector decisions that impact the environment.

Relationships Matter

The ability to influence another person is directly proportional to the strength of one’s relationship with that person. We all experience this in our lives through our many interactions and relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. And yet many environmental organizations fail to fully appreciate this simple truth in their work. As a result, they under-invest in building relationships as a means of influencing work on their issues.

At first blush, technology’s role in strengthening relationships might seem minor. But successful corporations and political campaigns know better. They use relationship-management databases and communication technologies to strengthen their ability to build relationships with potential customers and voters. These tools improve their understanding of customers and constituents and identify those who are most worthy of more intensive, personalized interactions.

Beyond Tools

History teaches us that technologies often catalyze new strategies and approaches. Technologies for managing relationships are no exception. As ONE/Northwest introduces these new tools to the environmental movement, we are keen to integrate them with new strategies and best practices from outside of our sector. We can learn a lot from the database work of political campaigns, for example, as well as the relationship-marketing techniques of the private sector, and the community organizing and education tactics of social sectors.

Engaging People

Influence comes in all shapes and sizes. It might be lobbying elected officials, working through a few influential community leaders, or rallying large numbers of citizens. The one constant is the power of good relationships. ONE/Northwest is now using the term “engagement” to describe the process of building relationships in order to influence decisions. In this sense, ONE/Northwest is changing the objectives of its programs from raising the technology capacity of environmental organizations to increasing their “engagement capacity.”

Networking a Movement

There are many decisions so large that they can’t be affected by the engagement activities of any one organization. These situations call for collaborative approaches to building relationships and influence with other institutions.

In addition to our work with individual organizations, over the next decade ONE/Northwest will invest heavily in increasing the collective engagement capacity of coalitions and other collaborative networks. Many of these collaborations will be among environmental organizations, but we believe some of the most important ones will involve institutions outside the traditional environmental movement such as the healthcare sector, businesses, and communities of faith.

The Road Ahead

The next decade will mark a critical period in human history. The decisions we make will have irreversible consequences for future generations. The new strategy approved by ONE/Northwest’s board in September 2006 gives our organization a single-minded focus on helping environmental advocates influence those decisions. We believe technology will play a critical role in strengthening that influence and are concentrating all of our organizational resources on fulfilling this vision.