Cacapon & Lost Rivers Land Trust is one of the most successful land trusts in West Virginia. As one of the few accredited land trusts in the Mountain State, CLRLT has preserved over 14,000 acres through conservation easements in Hampshire, Hardy, and Morgan counties. In 2023, CLRLT upgraded their digital communications and management to meet the needs of the dynamic organization focused on the future. The Downstream Project was honored to assist.
Two features are gamechangers; both are showcased in their website launched in October in partnership with Downstream. First is integrating events management into their membership database on the Little Green Light platform. LGL’s sophisticated use of custom forms enabled the land trust to manage their popular annual celebration event with automated registrations and notifications. That’s right, the same cloud-based CRM used by conservation nonprofits for donor management is a dynamic solution for events management — for both paid and free events.
Another challenge faced by land trusts and watershed groups is an intuitive project-history that can be shared with the public. To catalogue CLRLT’s properties, Downstream created a custom-post template that powers a searchable database of all the land trust’s easements, and categorizes them by attributes such as farms, forests, and county. It also enables CLRLT to add conservation values and a photo album to each project entry. In time, it will become a permanent archive of all their conservation projects.
“We wanted a site that would tell the story of our ecologically important Cacapon and Lost Rivers watershed, describe our efforts to protect it, and highlight the vital role our landowner partners play in providing outsized ecosystem benefits – clean water and clean air, among them – to millions of people in local and regional communities,” said CLRLT deputy director Marika Suval. “Moreover, Downstream’s skill at coding back-end features like public-facing forms and integrating them with our constituent database, boosts our tiny organization’s limited staff and time capacity.”
Visit Cacapon & Lost Rivers Land Trust to explore. You can learn more Little Green Light integrations from Downstream.
