• Environmental Investigation Agency

    Charities / Fundraising

    The Environmental Investigation Agency investigates and campaigns against environmental crime and abuse. It chiefly focuses on:

    • Elephants
    • Pangolins
    • Tigers
    • Forest crimes such as illegal logging and deforestation
    • Plastic pollution and the exploitation of whales, dolphins and porpoises.

    The charity also reduces the impact of climate change by campaigning to eliminate powerful refrigerant greenhouse gases, exposing related illicit trade and improving energy efficiency in the cooling sector. It uses its findings in hard-hitting reports to campaign for improved governance and more effective enforcement.

    One of the most interesting aspects of the charity’s approach is its use of undercover investigators who identify and disrupt the international criminal gangs who oversee much of this environmental crime and abuse.

  • Writing donor appeals

    The Environmental Investigation Agency initially got in touch with me looking for support on writing campaigns for their appeals. My first task was to write an appeal to save the forest elephants of West and Central Africa.

    These magnificent creatures are under threat from poachers who kill them for their ivory. Sadly, the special pink tinge of their ivory puts them at increased risk, as this ivory is highly desirable in markets such as Japan.

    The charity asked for my help in:

    • Writing an appeal letter to donors.
    • Writing an accompanying ‘lift piece’ to give further detail on the issues.
    • Writing web content about the campaign.

    For this appeal, I talked to Mary Rice, the charity’s executive director, who told me about their work to protect forest elephants. The charity gave me all the relevant background on the appeal and we agreed the areas it needed to cover.

    See more information on the appeal here and do please support this important work, if you possibly can.

    Since that time, I have also written appeals for the charity on stopping the use of endangered species in traditional Chinese medicine and protecting the Indonesian rainforest from deforestation during lockdown.

    Writing web pages to improve SEO

    My other work for the EIA includes writing long-form web pages to highlight the important work they do in:

    The aim of these pages, each 3,000 – 4,000 words long, is to bring together crucial projects carried out over the years and to make the charity’s work in these areas more visible.

    Testimonial

    “We have worked with Fiona since October 2019 on several fundraising appeals. She writes copy for our postal, email and online appeals. Her experience of writing copy for the web was also instrumental in improving the SEO of some of our web pages which now rank on page one of several Google searches.

    Working with Fiona on a freelance basis helps build our fundraising capacity as and when required. She brings energy to our team and her enthusiasm and creativity are contagious!”

    Elisabeth Michau, Head of Fundraising, EIA UK