Product surface validation · Non-profit · Enterprise

A 120-year non-profit, validating a hemispheric platform.

Audience and product validation for the National Audubon Society's Migratory Bird Initiative, a five-year, $25M science-and-engagement platform aggregating every available data source on North American migratory birds. The work set the foundation for the v1 platform now live at explorer.audubon.org.

Challenge

The Migratory Bird Initiative was committed to a five-year build, funded by a $5M Doolin Foundation gift and a $1M Joe Ellis grant. Eighteen months of internal MBI Science work had built the data foundation and the four-level Conservation Platform architecture. The audience model and the product theory were still open. Audubon engaged us in January 2020 to validate the audience, the product hypotheses, and the engagement formula before committing to a public-facing build.

Solution

• Phase 1 (12-14 weeks): Discovery and Audience Validation. Comparative pair-rank prioritization at kickoff; in-depth qualitative interviews across scientists, birders, conservation activists, and bird-curious civilians; an audience-development framework built around seven targetable segments.
• Phase 2 (7-9 weeks): Product Concepting and Validation. Tested four primary assumptions across audience desirability, product efficacy, and scientist participation. Built a high-fidelity prototype of an interactive bird-migration explorer with geospatial visualizations, localized bird data, and threat content.
• Data and tech audit against principles of modularization, reproducibility, and transparency, surfacing the architectural choices that needed to hold for a hemispheric platform.
• Strategic provocation: target the largest addressable market, Bird Love, to fund Conservation Activism and Scientific Engagement, with the Connections Explorer as the public-facing wedge.

Results

• Live platform. The v1 platform launched at explorer.audubon.org/home, built on the foundation our prototype work established.
• Aligned multi-stakeholder roadmap. Comparative pair-rank surfaced strategic divergence early and gave the leadership team a framework for resolving it; the Bird Love wedge became the orienting frame for v1 audience design.
• Audience-development framework with seven targetable segments, adopted by the MBI program team for downstream content, partnership, and engagement planning.
• Audience research surfaced that the platform's most technical features needed adaptation for non-scientist audiences, and that the Connections Explorer was the right public-facing wedge.

What this engagement says about validation in mission-driven non-profits.

Three patterns from this engagement are portable to future Sprints with similar clients: comparative pair-rank as the kickoff alignment instrument; an explicit assumption-scope contract that names what is in and out of validation; four-axis intent framing that surfaces the tradeoffs between candidate theories of impact rather than treating them as a list. The MBI archive is the canonical reference for what continuous validation looks like when the question is "how, not whether" and the asset being validated is part-platform, part-narrative, part-fundraising-mechanism.