Qualitative Measures

Making the intangible real for The Nature Conservancy

Role: Lead and Co-Facilitator

Challenge: The Nature Conservancy, Midwest Division was missing opportunities for innovation, volunteer support, and voice amplification. It was alienated from the people who knew most about the land they were a conservancy for.

Midwestern division team leads expressed concern about resourcing for unclear mandates regarding Community Engagement. They were frustrated at not having a voice in leadership decisions due to a complete disconnect from daily activities and overall mission.

Methods: Extended virtual and in-person Design Sprint.

Audit current community related materials (24 documents), sustainment practices, frameworks, and case studies
Define value proposition, Community Engagement, and metrics for success
Develop standardized method of measuring Community Engagement
Create sustainment model linked to existing annual cycle

Results: We collaborated on design of measurement tools, tactics for engagement, language alignment, and value propositions.

Design Sprint attendees self-reported being a team ready to lead the organization in Community Engagement methods and felt supported by leadership.

Toolkit: Community Engagement (CE) glossary, CE personas templates, CE Survey templates, CE scoring rubric

Rubric: utilizes metrics such as number of volunteers and % of change in income from sustainable resource practices to identify CE levels within four categories aligned to sustainability

Sustainment plan: Annual cycle with time-bound toolkit submission, Q&A sessions for CE leadership representative, and LT conversations determining resourcing decision

Surveys and personas directly fed our metrics so CE could be gathered in a spreadsheet rubric with a short narrative that would all be sent to the Strategy Review Committee annually.

This rubric tallied all the data from the prior year to formulate a level (1-4) of CE achieved for each program. Data could be further analyzed by their four People Measures, and a narrative provided context.

Virtual sessions facilitated in Miro allowed for participation across states and in-the-field. We started with collaborative language building to define our challenge. We defined our audience with persona building, then created metrics aligned to our four levels of Community Engagement (CE).