Planning and Strategy

What is it?

Planning means different things to different people. But at its heart, planning is simply a systematic, comprehensive approach to identifying:

1. What you want to accomplish.
2. How you intend to accomplish it.
3. Specific ways/metrics you will measure whether (or to what degree) you have succeeded over time.

Recognize that:

1. It is possible to achieve R3 outcomes without having a formal plan.
2. Having a plan in place only provides better results if it is well-built and well-implemented.

Experience shows that effective plans make it much more likely for an organization to achieve its R3 outcomes.

Anyone involved in planning will tell you the process is often just as important (sometimes more important) than the document. Involving the right people and being realistic about every step in the process can empower an organization to make tremendous strides toward achieving R3 outcomes. A good plan can also provide the structure and guidance to empower the R3 Team to say no to ineffective or redundant tactics and strategies.

Speaking of the Team, there are often several different levels of teams engaged in the R3 planning process. For purposes of this Practitioner’s Guide, we use the following loose definitions:

• R3 Team – the core group of people who are specifically assigned to conduct R3 work (R3 practitioners).
• Planning Team – the group assigned to develop the R3 Plan. This group almost always includes the R3 Team but is likely to have additional members who are not R3 practitioners.
• Writing Team – the group of people assigned to write the plan document—to put the planning team’s work into words. Members of this team are usually assigned by subject area, e.g., separate author(s) for hunting, shooting sports, or other activity areas (fishing, boating, etc.).

Why is it important?

There is an old saying: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there,” and indeed, “Every road will get you there.” The R3 enterprise is a perfect example of this. For decades, organizations have done “R3 work” without clear plans to guide them—without goals, objectives, and methods for determining whether they are achieving their goals. With the ongoing decline in hunting license sales, the R3 community can no longer afford to take such a shotgun approach.

A solid plan can also be a powerful protection against mission creep. When the next “great idea” comes along, you can hold it up against the plan to see if and where it fits. If it doesn’t fit, you have a strong foundation for pushing back against adding it.

The planning process aids in engaging internal staff and external partners in planning for and contributing to a shared future, creating a structure for accountability and reporting, and a way to celebrate and track accomplishments.

How can your organization help its practitioners?

• Allow/encourage staff to spend time creating and implementing an R3 Plan.
• Ensure the R3 Planning Team has broad representation across the organization.
• Empower the R3 Planning Team to engage appropriate staff across the organization.
• Show the R3 Planning Team how/where the R3 Plan fits into the broader organization mission/strategic plan.

Engaging Leadership

Real-world experience across many agencies and organizations shows that supportive leadership is critical to the ultimate success of R3 planning efforts. Without strong leadership support, staff will assume that R3 efforts are the responsibility of the R3 Coordinator or other specific staff assigned to “handle R3.” This is the worst-case scenario—the exact opposite of effective R3 planning and implementation.

An R3 Coordinator could indeed draft an R3 plan for the entire agency or organization without anyone else’s involvement. And that would pretty much guarantee it would not be implemented. A key factor in developing an effective plan is to get input and buy-in from across the organization. This is challenging to accomplish without clear support and direction from leadership.

If you have been tasked with the development or revision of an R3 plan, one of the first steps in your process should be to ask for a meeting with leadership—starting with your supervisor but including as many leaders as you can and as high up the chain as you can go. Ask them for direction and support. The leadership of some organizations have sent messages and even video messages to all staff, stating that an R3 Plan is being developed, that a coordinator has been tasked with guiding the effort, and that leadership wants staff to make R3 a priority. Alabama, Kentucky, and Texas have run internal “I am R3” campaigns. Support from top-level management is great, but if your organization is large enough to have a middle layer of management (bureau or section chief, etc.), try to involve them as well. If you can secure mid-level support, there is less chance that support for R3 work will dry up if changes happen at the top.

By their nature, comprehensive R3 efforts cross divisional boundaries and require assistance from across the organization. For many people, the lift will not be significant (many are doing R3 work already, even if not by that name). Still, a single person can create a logjam for large efforts if they don’t recognize the task as being part of an organizational priority. Support and communication from leadership can go a long way toward gaining and sustaining cooperation across the organization.

In addition, your efforts can be much more consistent and less susceptible to sudden changes if R3 is “baked in” to your organization’s structure and function. As you engage leadership and prepare to conduct an R3 planning process, check out the chapter on Organization-Wide Buy-In, which covers these topics in more detail. Building a broad base of allies and support for R3 across your organization is critically important to the plan’s ultimate implementation.

Identify Planning Team

There is a common saying among the R3 Community that “R3 is everybody’s job,” but every successful planning effort needs a leader to ensure it happens. For most state agencies, that will start with the R3 Coordinator. Some private organizations also have R3 coordinators or may have another position tasked with leading R3 efforts. Even if the organization does not have a formal R3 Coordinator position, it will be very important to identify a single person who can fill that role. Many people will be involved in building a solid R3 Plan, but there needs to be a single person who leads the charge and holds others accountable. See the (LINK) Staffing and Personnel chapter for more details about specific skill sets to look for.

Because all states implement R3 differently, CAHSS has assembled descriptions of how four states structured R3 in their organization.

• Arizona
• California
• Georgia
• Iowa

Once a coordinator (or someone who can play that role during planning) is in place, the next step is identifying a planning team to assist. Ideally, this planning group would have broad representation from across the organization. It would be made up of individuals with a personal interest in R3. Some additional characteristics to look for in team members:

• Diverse expertise and experience (broadly representative of organization staff)
• Diverse racial/ethnic/cultural background (broadly representative of state/region)
• Capacity to assist (allowed/encouraged to spend time on the planning effort)
• Detractors/Opposition/Resistant Personnel (It is important to get their perspectives and their buy-in to the process. These team members may be the most challenging but often provide the most valuable perspectives.)

You should be prepared to tell prospective planning team members what the task entails and what is expected of them (planning horizon, number and frequency of meetings, potential assignments, etc.).

When to involve external partners

Across the country, federal, state, and local government agencies and a wide variety of private organizations and industries are working to achieve R3 outcomes (although not always by that name and quite often completely unaware of each other). Bringing these efforts together prevents or minimizes duplication of effort. At best, it synergizes all efforts. The question is when to involve external organizations in your planning process.

Some organizations have planned using the “big tent” approach—identifying and inviting everyone to the table at the very beginning.

Advantages:

• You get a good idea of what efforts are ongoing, where interests lie, and, therefore, what strategies you can likely leave to others when you get to the implementation phase.
• You (hopefully) generate interest and buy-in from a large group of stakeholders long before it’s time to implement.

Disadvantages:

• You cannot control what external organizations are going to do. You likely have little recourse if an outside organization misses a deadline that you were counting on.
• The planning process may bring out internal problems, personality clashes, or capacity issues that you may not want to air in a public forum.

Although the “big tent” approach can work, facilitators who have helped multiple organizations conduct R3 planning generally favor a stepwise process where you complete internal planning first. This allows you to identify what your organization is currently doing, what you are good at, and what you want to do more of before integrating with other stakeholders. Finally, any unavoidable pauses in the planning process are much easier to manage and less likely to damage the overall effort if handled internally before engaging external stakeholders. The “Statewide R3 Collaborations” section of the CAHSS website offers additional insights.

Ultimately, the R3 Coordinator should work with leadership to determine which approach offers the most benefits. Regardless of approach, you should create a relationship with the Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports (CAHSS) and the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation (RBFF) as you begin. Both organizations have insights and resources that can help you throughout the planning process—including a review of your final plan document.

Muster Resources

Effective plans are ongoing but should be based on the best available information and examples. Fortunately, a LOT has been tried and learned over the past ten years, with more results coming out every day. But don’t jump too far too fast! Everyone wants to immediately conduct efforts to “get more hunters and shooting sports participants.”

That’s great, but if you are assigned to develop or revise a hunting/shooting R3 Plan, the first step is to think strategically about it and to learn from others who have done the same.

Start by reviewing the resources in the table below. Take multiple days if you can and do a deep dive into these resources. There are even more planning resources available in the CAHSS Clearinghouse. Dig as deep as your time and commitments will allow before you begin.

You should also check out R3 plans that other agencies have produced. There is a list of these linked in the table below. A word of caution: you should never just take an existing plan and cut and paste your organization’s name into it and call it done. Your organization has situations, programs, people, and other factors that nobody else has. Much can be learned from someone else’s plan and experience. Still, there is no substitute for going through the planning process and building a plan that will meet your specific situations and needs.

As you review what others have done, talk to them, too! The Council to Advance Hunting and Shooting Sports has set up an online R3 Community full of R3 practitioners from around the country who are grappling with these issues every day. Everyone in this community is eager to share successes, failures, and ideas for how to do R3 better. Take advantage of that resource.

As part of your effort to muster resources, you should conduct a thorough inventory of the R3 programs and other efforts your organization is currently involved in. An excellent tool for helping with this process is R3 program mapping. See the separate section on program mapping in this chapter.

If your organization has any data on hunters and shooting sports participants (license sales data, range permit sales, program attendance, pre- and post-program survey data, etc.), now is the time to collect as much of that as possible, organized by as many demographic variables as possible. For state agencies, license sales data will be instrumental in identifying areas where your plan should focus. For shooting sports participants, range permit sales, user logs, and survey data would be beneficial. If you are in a state agency, at a minimum review the real-time license data at www.R3Dashboard.org. Even if your state does not yet contribute data to this national effort, the dashboard can be a good starting point to review trends of comparable states or regions.

NOTE: In many situations, R3 practitioners have great difficulty accessing these data. Often there are legal, administrative, and political barriers that must be navigated. Be prepared to engage senior leadership to help you with this—and do it early. These data are critical to conducting effective R3 work.

Implementing your R3 plan, tracking progress

Although this is a chapter on R3 plan development, a few important thoughts on implementing the plan are in order here.

When R3 Plans (or any kind of plan) fail or “sit on a shelf and collect dust,” it is almost always because no one was assigned to track progress and follow up. Even if the plan is very tactical and has specific assignments and deadlines for the strategies and actions, if no one is looking to see if the assignments are met, who will know and who will care?

Consequently, one of the most important parts of the planning process is to assign a person or a team to track progress, send reminders, and generally hold staff accountable for the plan elements they are responsible for. Too often, organizations do not make arrangements for this at all, or maybe the task is loosely assigned to the planning team without any direct instruction or authority to do it well. Don’t let the planning process end without a specific process to track and report accomplishments. To this end, having written records of progress, completion, and next steps is often helpful. Several such templates are listed in the table of resources below.

For more detailed information on evaluating your plan, see Evaluation and Monitoring.