KidsGardening Advances Their Mission and Connects Members with Online Community

KidsGardening was looking for a way to improve engagement and reach more members.

“Prior to having an online community we relied on our 45K-member email list and social channels to reach our audience, but it was mainly one-way communication,” said Beth Saunders, Director of Marketing and Communications ​at KidsGardening. “We wanted to get our members’ feedback, create peer-to-peer connections, and encourage them to share their great ideas with each other. We also wanted to offer a year-round space for members to connect outside of events, since those are either once a year or may not be in their specific region. Our Higher Logic-powered online community enables this to happen.”

Though there were some regional and segmented online communities in the gardening space, KidsGardening wanted to create a space that would be open to anyone – parents, educators, people with any level of experience who are passionate about kids learning how to garden.

The team at KidsGardening did focus groups and surveys and learned from respondents that many people were the only garden educator in their area and had no one to connect with – further confirming the team’s hunch that they needed an online community.

When they were searching for the right online community product, they chose Higher Logic because of the features, integration, and value.

Since launching, KidsGardening has received glowing feedback from their community members – and they now have another way to get members engaged. Not only that, with their Salesforce-Higher Logic integration, they’re able to pull profile demographics, experience level, and more to use all that information to send better communications. They can also see how many members are in each segment of their membership, which allows them to plan how to allocate support for those groups.

All this strengthens their fundraising campaigns, helps them create lesson plans and curriculums tailored to member needs, and improves their grant programs.

KidsGardening’s online community enables the organization to further their mission and support gardeners working with kids all around the country. They’ve even set up a way for groups to host their own subgroup within their online community. This allows them to reach and support more people and opens up an opportunity to generate non-dues revenue.

KidsGardening is a nonprofit organization working to support a community of educators and caregivers to bring the life-changing benefits of gardening to kids through their grant programs, contests, curriculum, and educational activities. They use Salesforce as their CRM.