The Nature Conservancy Reviews

Pros

I was given a lot of flexibility in my assignment that allowed me to spend a considerable amount of time in the field rather than in the office.

Cons

My job was somewhat nebulous in nature with the end product unclear for most of my time there.

Pros

small company small office no parking problem

Cons

hardly to build professional connections

Pros

Surrounded by intelligent colleagues whom are open to giving interns advice and suggestions. Very well known organization in industry so I was proud to speak of the organization as my internship site.

Cons

No Pay. No positions available in area so its hard to say what the possibilities could've been. Best open opportunities were for either science people or executives but not recent college graduates.

Advice to Senior Management

Very intelligent people. Could be more oganizaed and prepared to challenge interns but a great opportunity for the most part.

Pros

As one of the few large conservation NGOs that does research, there are opportunities to interact and work with brilliant intellectual minds similar to a university but also work on applied real-world conservation issues. Excellent work-life balance (35 hour work week) and support for professional development.

Cons

Frequent restructuring of the central science office results in confusion and sometimes low morale. There was a lack of transparency about salary information but that has changed in the past few years. Some staff express frustration about lack of opportunities to move up in the organization but my experience was there were such opportunities, they just required geographic relocation.

Advice to Senior Management

The loss of long-time staff due to reorganizations and layoffs has been a huge hit to staff morale, a loss of institutional knowledge, and as a result has lead to decreased in effective conservation efforts. Incremental change based on evidence about what is working and what isn't at the organization would be more effective than repeated overhauls of the organizational structure.

Pros

401k match is better than most in the industry.

Cons

No quantifiable measures of success, therefore no evaluation system for employees/teams.
No intra-corp communications/cooperation, therefore no consistent standards, no consistent information sharing, & no career growth opportunities, as each of the 50-100 business units stays busy wasting time & donor mega-dollars reinventing the wheel every day at every location.
HQ systems are Stone Age.

Advice to Senior Management

CEO should introduce Goldman Sachs-type bonus/incentives system, instead of merely complaining that he is amazed that unlike at GS, TNC managers do not prioritize supporting the success of their direct reports. Overall the company is an irrelevancy in the conservation movement due to the above.

Pros

Tercek's leadership will take TNC to the next level. He has real focus on delivering global results. There can be a real sense of belonging to a "family" of people committed to conserving nature. There are so many dedicated, insightful delightful people who lead, and to learn from.

Cons

Decentralized chapters/state organizations are not in synch with global vision. Local personalities determine local outcomes with little regional/national oversight, inconsistent with global goals. Local trustee boards are not connected to the global vision.

Advice to Senior Management

Their decentralized history is hurting them. in the past 10 years, TNC has changed from a decentralized organization driving the vision, to a centralized headquarters charting the vision and trying to get the local organizations to support them. It's going to take some time before the local organizations reconfigure their plans to best support all of the goals, and the global organization needs to adjust and give a bit more freedom to local needs.

Pros

work-life balance, benefits, mission, attitude of co-workers

Cons

pay seems to be better than most non-profits, but still on the low side

Pros

The Work/life balance is excellent, there are many Friendly people; TNC's goals/ideas are really top notch.

Cons

the pay isn't that great, it's okay, but it could be better. But hey, it's non-profit

Advice to Senior Management

Be open to all ideas.

Pros

Good work being done on the ground in the field
Good pay, benefits and opportunity for professional staff
Greater emphasis on working with partners across the organization (as opposed to making "partners" do what TNC desires)
Very smart people, mostly working effectively together

Cons

Heavy internal and external rhetoric/spin on global strategy through policy and partnerships (sexy) with minimal correlation to ROI relative to less ambitious (less sexy) but more tried and true investments and their relative and more readily measurable returns

Generating money for conservation strategies broadly and mistakenly used as a surrogate for actual conservation heavily celebrated and crowed as wins

Advice to Senior Management

HQ should focus less on policy, planning and revising strategy to prove each new smart person is smarter than the last and more on supporting the field at implementing less grandiose but more directly measurably, leveraged outcomes at multiple scales. Yes, the mission is to protect biodiversity of the world, but there is such a thing as spreading yourself too thin and failing to secure the biggest possible bang for your intellectual and philanthropic bucks.. Think big, fail big. Think smart, succeed smart.

Pros

It's the leading big conservation organization in the world, with a great brand that the marketing group, despite its best/worst efforts, has not yet managed to destroy.

Cons

Oh, management changes its mind about the direction of the company every two weeks or so -- when it has a direction in mind, that is. There's a huge gap between senior leadership and the rest of the company: ideas and creativity just die at a certain point in the hierarchy, and it's easy for smart, entry-level people to get discouraged there. In a way, the place is just way too successful for its own good -- big-donor fundraising rules the roost, and the prevailing ethos is very conservative, very risk-averse, and frankly not very engaged at reignited an American conservation movement. You get the sense that everyone would be happy if they just cultivated 200 extremely rich donors and forgot about mass appeal. The Nature Conservancy's reputation and success at attracting donors of a certain age masks significant internal decay.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop hiring talented people and then thwarting their talent at every turn, except in those very narrow ways that the organization recognizes and rewards. Wake up and realize that you're about to fall off a demographic cliff -- you have no donor/member base under 60 to speak of, and no chance of attracting a significant one with some of the current leadership in place.