A painting hangs in the National Geographic Society‘s headquarters here that depicts the moment of the organization’s birth. The date is January 13, 1888, and the setting is the Beaux Arts-style mansion of the Cosmos Club, a private social organization that even today limits membership to those who demonstrate “distinction, character, and sociability.”

The society’s 33 founding fathers — scientists, cartographers, explorers, lawyers, military officers, and bankers — are gathered around a conference table, the organization’s chartering papers spread before them. The painting, though completed in 1963, looks like an Old Master’s work from the 1700s, its canvas bathed in a dark, golden hue, the faces etched in solemnity.

Jill Tiefenthaler, the newest leader of the society, bears little resemblance to the founders or even to her more immediate predecessors. After more than 130 years of leadership by men mostly cut from the same East Coast, WASPy, elite-school cloth — many of them even from the same family — the society’s board in 2020 handed the CEO position to a woman with altogether different roots.

Courtesy of National Geographic

Tiefenthaler (pronounced TEE-fin-taller) grew up in Breda, Iowa, a community of 500 founded in the 1800s, a few years before the society, by mostly German-Catholic families. She went to mass daily and worked for the family’s farm and popcorn company, Snappy. Among her chores: cooking meals for the hired hands, rounding up pigs, and managing the books, which she started doing in sixth grade. She attended not an Ivy but St. Mary’s, a small Catholic women’s college in Indiana, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in economics, a discipline seldom in demand on National Geographic’s explorations.

Most important for the society’s business model, Tiefenthaler is a fundraiser. And a good one. Before coming to the society, she was president of Colorado College and closing out a nearly half-billion-dollar campaign, an impressive sum for a small liberal-arts institution.

Traditionally, fundraising has been an afterthought at National Geographic. Its eponymous magazine, cable TV channels, and other media assets brought in hundreds of millions of dollars annually. But those prized assets, like most traditional media, spun much less gold in the 21st century’s digital age, and in 2015, the society sold the lion’s share into a joint for-profit venture initially controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox but run by Disney since 2018.

Now, with Tiefenthaler’s arrival, the society is building a college-like fundraising operation that aims to bring in $1 billion over the next decade, or $100 million a year, roughly four times the total it has raised in recent years. It’s also trying to step out of the shadow of its famous magazine and TV channels and fix itself in the public’s mind as a global conservation group — no easy feat in a nonprofit field flooded with groups aiming to save the planet.

‘The Wonder of the World’

“We like to say that science is our foundation, and storytelling is our superpower.”

Tiefenthaler is pitching the society to an audience at the March SXSW Conference, the glitzy annual gathering in Austin, Tex., of tech, film, music, and digital creators. The organization, she says, aims to “protect and illuminate the wonder of the world,” quoting the group’s new mission statement.

Tiefenthaler reads her talk from a podium. Her delivery is steady, if not exciting, but she mixes in richly produced videos of today’s National Geographic explorers and storytellers. Projected on a giant screen, each is cinematic, with stirring soundtracks and compelling personal narratives. And each is packaged as a case study of the institution’s impact on a world in peril.

Courtesy of National Geographic Society

There are mountain adventurers Tom Matthews and Baker Perry, who led the largest-ever scientific expedition on Everest to study climate change’s impact on the mountain and those living in its shadow. Enric Sala, a college professor who quit academia to devote himself to ocean conservation. And Tara Roberts, a journalist covering the work of Black scuba divers, archeologists, and historians documenting slave-trade shipwrecks.

To those 33 founders at the Cosmos Club, the society’s raison d’être was to fund the work of scientists and adventurers and then disseminate the findings. Nonetheless, faced with shaky finances at the outset, they found themselves building a media venture. Inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the society’s president from 1898 to 1903, directed the transformation of its dry, technical journal into a mass-market magazine. Use photos, he insisted, “and plenty of them.”

The primacy of media for the society was apparent as early as 1902. When a volcano exploded in Martinique, Bell denied a request to send a scientific team to investigate. “Leave science to others,” he declared, and instead ordered photos and an account that would be of “living interest.”

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Courtesy of National Geographic Society

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Over the next century, society leaders followed Bell’s lead, investing heavily in its media ventures, which came to include books, other magazines, maps, children’s products, and the several TV channels. Along the way, Tiefenthaler says in an interview, the society forgot how to be a nonprofit. Before she was hired, she and philanthropist Jean Case, the group’s board chair, talked about the society as a start-up nonprofit, although one with a powerful brand.

“When I arrived, it was like we were trying to figure out what it means to be a nonprofit,” Tiefenthaler says. “A big part of our strategy was thinking, OK, where are we having the most impact?”

The answer, society leaders decided, had a lot to do with the explorers and storytellers. National Geographic had never stopped funding expeditions, backing such legends as Richard Leakey and Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau and Bob Ballard.

Tiefenthaler, however, aims to do more to support and promote the explorers. “When I joined the society, I quickly realized that they had to play a critical role in our future,” she tells the SXSW audience.

Courtesy of National Geographic Society

While the society is reducing the number of its grants, it says it’s increasing the dollars most explorers receive so they can expand their work and have more impact. It is also expanding training and support, particularly with a focus on lifting the profile of explorers through events that include school visits, TED Talks, and appearances in National Geographic media properties.

Sala, the professor turned ocean activist, is an example of how society backing can change the trajectory of a scientist. He got his first National Geographic grant in 2004, and his funding grew until he became an explorer-in-residence in 2011 as the organization helped build out his Pristine Seas program. Since 2013, he’s won a string of environmental awards, including the prestigious Prince Albert I Grand Medal for “making the voice of the Ocean heard loud and clear.”

The video of his work that Tiefenthaler shows at SXSW includes clips of world leaders of Chile and other countries announcing new marine sanctuaries inspired, the video says, by Pristine Seas; altogether, Tiefenthaler tells the audience, Sala’s sanctuaries are more than twice the size of India. The goal of the program: protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030, just the kind of impact donors often seek.

Trading Pike’s Peak for D.C.

Tiefenthaler was named CEO in January 2020 and arrived at headquarters in August. With staff operating remotely, there were days when she looked out from the glass walls of her bright, relatively small seventh-floor office onto empty hallways. She had left the Colorado College campus and its views of Pike’s Peak for Washington’s downtown business district, which was largely empty of traffic and life. “It was a little depressing,” she says.

Five years after the deal with Fox, the society was managing a lot of uncertainty. Tiefenthaler was the society’s third top executive since the deal. Her predecessor, Tracy Wolstencroft, a trustee and 25-year Goldman Sachs veteran, had announced he was leaving the post after only about 10 months. Turnover plagued the advancement department as well. Robert Bernard — who in 2019 left a 20-year run at Microsoft to manage the society’s partnerships with foundations, corporations, and nonprofits — departed after less than a year. Like other nonprofits during the pandemic, the society had a round of layoffs before Teifenthaler’s arrival, shrinking its staff by 5 percent.

The society continued to hold a 27 percent stake in National Geographic Partners, the for-profit joint media venture controlled by Disney. But the draw from the venture was not bringing in what had been projected, according to a former executive, in part because the cable TV channels, like most of the industry, were underperforming.

“The nonprofit side was getting less and less money,” says the former executive, who asked not to be named because of connections to the society. “When they negotiated the joint venture, they didn’t anticipate the collapse [of TV]. They did not properly budget against that collapse.”

Carlton Ward Jr., National Geographic Society

(The Society declined to provide details about the funding it draws from the Disney partnership.)

With the board and her senior team, Tiefenthaler created a strategic plan for the society — the first in its history — that included a new business model. The chief revenue components:

• The society will continue to draw revenue from its 27 percent stake in National Geographic Partners as well as rent and other fees that the venture pays.
• The organization’s endowment is another source of cash; it stands at more than $1.4 billion, thanks in part to a big infusion following the deal with Fox, which netted $725 million for the society. A conservative 4 percent draw from those funds could generate roughly $50 million to $60 million annually.
• Philanthropy, meanwhile, will take on greater revenue importance, providing tens of millions in new money as well as capital and legacy gifts.
  

For the first time, Case says, the organization decided to invest deeply in fundraising. “We always knew that there was a terrific opportunity to enable others to jump in and support our work,” she says. “But we never really had an infrastructure or a leader who brought that kind of passion before.”

To help build that infrastructure, Tiefenthaler plucked Kara Ramirez Mullins from the college ranks as her chief development officer. Ramirez Mullins, formerly the vice president for advancement at the University of Virginia’s business school, is on a hiring spree, with the advancement office expected to grow to 66 full-time staff by year’s end, more than twice its size when she arrived in the fall of 2020.

“We were severely understaffed for years,” she says. “There were really no systems or processes in place, the kind of basics of what you would find in any advancement operation.”

Many of the hires — more than few from higher education — are joining a new operations unit that includes teams for research and donor-pipeline development. Direct-response and communications work, which were outsourced, have been folded into annual giving and membership, which is also beefing up. In addition, Ramirez Mullins is adding campaign staff for the 10-year $1 billion drive.

Courtesy of National Geographic Society

Lisa Herzog, whose duties include overseeing leadership giving, arrived from the Wolf Trap Foundation, a Washington performing-arts organization, not long after Ramirez Mullins and Tiefenthaler. Hers traditionally was a quiet corner of the society, with only two gift officers. Indeed, only 20 donors had made contributions of $50,000 or more in 2019. Worse, perhaps, fewer than 10 of the two dozen trustees gave to the society that year; many had never even been asked to make a gift, Ramirez Mullins says.

To outsiders, the power of the National Geographic brand would suggest that it had a juggernaut fundraising and marketing team in place, Herzog says. “When I came on board, that was simply not the case.”

Advancement also has for the first time turned society events into donor opportunities to “brush up with the brand,” as Tiefenthaler puts it. Last year, at two signature events, the Explorers Festival and Storytellers Summit, small sessions were set up for corporate and major donors to talk with the society’s explorers and storytelling fellows. In the past, attendees inspired by a talk had on occasion written a check on the spot — to the explorer, not the society.

$75 Million in First Year

The 2021 fundraising year was promising. Membership in the society grew, and the organization brought in $75 million in pledges and contributions — a big increase from the $20 million to $30 million netted in previous years. The total also includes $31 million in planned gifts.

Big gifts from corporate and major donors jumped considerably. The year saw 11 contributions of $1 million or more — up from one in 2020. The advancement team also netted 59 contributions of $100,000 or more, an increase of 28. Perhaps not coincidentally, each of the trustees made a donation.

“We’re trying to raise a billion dollars as fast as we can because we’re trying to save the planet,” Tiefenthaler says. The society also aims to remake its headquarters, what’s called “base camp,” as a celebration of exploration — a project involving Disney’s design “imagineers.”

The gains in 2021 reflect the investment of energy and money into fundraising, the society says, aided by the booming stock market and a big partnership with the De Beers diamond company that had been discussed before the arrival of Tiefenthaler and Ramirez Mullins.

The fundraising team says it should reach the $1 billion goal with ease. “We’ve really just scratched the surface,” Herzog says. The donor pipeline, she adds, “is an embarrassment of riches.”

Case, who joined the National Geographic board in 2010, is bullish about the organization’s repositioning. “I do think we have transformed from what really was more of a media entity to something where the main event is science and exploration,” she says.

The public itself may not reach that conclusion so easily. The society’s conservation message is not too different from previous postsale efforts. Wolstencroft, named the society’s top executive in 2018, declared in a letter to National Geographic magazine readers that it would “catalyze action to achieve a planet in balance.”

Although the society is branding itself as a serious-minded community of explorers racing to save the planet, Disney has other goals as it pumps out the magazine and other media under the National Geographic logo. Some of the TV fare, in particular, seems at odds with the society’s messaging. Case in point: Wicked Tuna, a popular reality show, features commercial fishing boats battling to become the top earner. The boat captains adhere to catch limits, and there’s discussion of the fate of the blue tuna they hunt, but it’s not exactly content that bolsters the society’s bona fides as a planet saver.

Perhaps the biggest challenge: The conservation field is crowded with nonprofits. Tiefenthaler says the society appeals to those looking for a trusted, nonpartisan actor, which should distinguish it from traditional activist organizations like the Sierra Club. But zoos and aquariums such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium have taken up more conservation field and advocacy work in the past decade as part of their mission and business strategy.

“It’s clearly a trend,” says Colleen Dilenschneider of Impacts Experience, which does market research for museums, zoos, aquariums, and other cultural organizations.

The society, however, believes its explorers will help it stand out from the crowd. “How many organizations can you say have explorers? We’re the only one,” says Joanne Meredith, a former college fundraiser who joined Ramirez Mullins as vice president for annual giving and membership. “There are many organizations that say they’re saving the planet, but not in the way the society has been doing it for 130 years.”

At SXSW, Tiefenthaler talks of that century-plus of work — Leakey. Goodall. Cousteau. The first woman to lead the society and its first fundraiser-in-chief flashes an image on the screen of the painting of the 33 founders, all men, and tells the story of the society’s first expedition, an 1890 survey and summit of Mount St. Elias, the highest peak on the Alaska-Canada border: “We remain the home of the explorer.”