State Fish & Wildlife Agencies Detailed License Buying Trends

State wildlife agencies, like Fortune 100 businesses, must have accurate information and up-to-date data to succeed. Understanding license buying trends or confirming the success or failure of marketing efforts requires accurate and timely insights. However, agencies often lack the resources of Fortune 100 companies.

Limited staff, not enough time and tight budgets all conspire to make gathering and analyzing such data very difficult. However, data dashboards may be a useful solution. Like the dashboard of your car, data dashboards provide a series of "gauges," each providing the user with a quick, visual summary of a key performance measure. With a few quick clicks, the contents of the dashboard shift to provide insights into another type of license customer, such as changing the view from fishing license holders to turkey hunters. Whether it's the total number of resident hunting licenses sold in the last quarter or the number of new fishing license buyers recruited in the past year, when viewed together, dashboards provide agency staff with a simple, fast, and visual update on recent license sales trends and feedback regarding R3 efforts.

Agency staff don't need to be trained data analysts or invest in software to understand the data presented in the dashboards. One run of a state's license database is required to properly format the necessary data, and then anyone in the staff can quickly see the latest trends using a free reader.

Data dashboards began in response to a need expressed by the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA) HASSWRP subcommittee to help assess how R3 efforts were generating results. They designed a "scorecard" to track how participation metrics were trending. Southwick Associates was then hired by Oregon to develop the first scorecard as a pilot effort.

The pilot scorecard showed that tracking each metric via standard spreadsheets would be costly, time-consuming and difficult to digest given the numbers of charts produced. After informal discussions between the states and industry representatives about possible improvements at the 2015 National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) Summit, the NSSF funded the development of pilot dashboards to help demonstrate their potential applications and benefits.

Building upon the NSSF's contribution, the Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports (CAHSS) is facilitating efforts to encourage states to develop their own dashboards as part of the national R3 plan implementation. Considering states currently receive in-depth regional and national trend data only once every five years, the goal is to have enough states generating dashboards to permit the development of regional and national dashboards. If successful, R3 efforts can be improved and greater investments may be possible once the broader community understands the returns generated from ever-improving R3 efforts.