Getting the Process Right — No More “One-Day Wonders”
DJ Case has been on the forefront of efforts to help agencies and their partners assess and improve existing programs and design and implement new programs to increase hunter and angler participation across the country.
For too long, the hunting and fishing community was content to conduct one-day fishing derbies and youth hunts with little thought about how those events might help them achieve their objectives (if they even had objectives at all). DJ Case helped the community apply social science and communication theory to the hunter and angler recruitment, retention, and reactivation (R3) process, making these efforts more effective.
Reaching Out to the Locavore Audience
We worked with the Southeastern and Midwestern Associations of Fish and Wildlife Agencies to develop Locavore.Guide, a comprehensive “train-the-trainer” toolkit for creating or enhancing programs that identify, invite, and engage the non-traditional, food-motivated audiences that have interest in taking up hunting and fishing as a way to gather healthy food. Nearly half of all state fish and wildlife agencies sent representatives to a train-the-trainer workshop we taught in association with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.
Best Practices in Boating, Fishing and Aquatic Resources Stewardship Education
We worked with the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation and a team of experts to develop this toolkit, which includes a workbook, teacher’s guide, and fact sheets, that gives agencies and their partners an easy-to-use process for identifying what they really want to accomplish and ways to assess whether their programs are effective at achieving those goals.
Hunter R3 Think Tank
We worked with the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the International Hunter Education Association to convene a think tank of national experts on hunter education, recruitment, retention, and social science research to review the literature, make recommendations for overcoming obstacles and increasing hunter/shooter participation, identify holes in the research and produce a handbook to guide agencies, NGOs and others in their efforts to recruit and retain hunter education graduates as lifelong hunters and shooters. This Think Tank Report became the foundation for Best Practices and further research into R3 issues and solutions.
Best Practices for Hunting and Shooting Recruitment and Retention
DJ Case worked with the National Shooting Sports Foundation and a team of experts to develop this collection of user-friendly tools, research results and workshop designs to help practitioners create, improve and evaluate hunting and shooting sports R3 programs.