The national hunting and shooting sports action plan was published by the wildlife management institute and COUNCIL to advance hunting and the shooting sports (COUNCIL) in 2016

The work on the plan started years before, involved a workgroups of 20 professionals (nonprofits, industry, and agencies), and resulted in the guiding document under which R3 capacity has increase exponentially. The second immediate recommendation in the plan was to, complete the hunting and fishing participation scorecard on an annual (or more frequent) basis. This scorecard is what is now referred to as a dashboard and the R3 community embraced the concept whole-heartedly with state-level hunting and fishing license dashboards. Agency, industry, and nonprofit R3 practitioners soon realized the need to look at these data at macro level and demand for regional and nation-level data became apparent. This demand led to a groundbreaking partnership between agencies, nonprofits, and industry to create the first regional an nation level dashboard with multistate conservation grant program (MSCGP) support. This dashboard increased R3 staff competency and capacity to evaluate, manage, and interpret data by summarizing state-level license sales for comparisons at the regional and national levels. While useful, semi-annual updates limited the on-the-ground implication of the data as there was significant lag time. In 2022, the dashboard was upgraded from semi-annual updates to reporting on a daily basis with MSCGP and partner support. Reported elements include the number of unique license buyers by day month year, numbers of newly recruited license and churn rates in total and by age, gender, and residency. As of may 30, 2023 seven states were live, six in production, two more have signed the data security and participation agreement and 16 more were in process. Progress was slower than expected due to unforeseen circumstances (e.g., new data security legislation in states). The project team anticipates 20 states being live by the end of 2023 and for IT to be live for public use.buy-in has increased among numerous states and IT is time to make the final push to ensure there is a national representative number of states contributing data by the end of 2024. With MSCGP support, more states will be added to the dashboard and the current ones maintained, thus providing greater accuracy and insights. The goal remains to host 35 reporting states. Please not the vendor, southwick associates, and its technical partner, pragmatim, are using the latest data transfer and security standards. To participate states do no share personally identifiable information (PII).the COUNCIL took over facilitation of this project in 2023 on behalf of 12 partners, keeps no funds from the award, and intends to ensure IT is brought to completion. The COUNCIL has communicated to all partners that this will be the last request for build funding for the dashboard and 2024 will be the make or break year to get a nationally representative number of states involved. In early 2024, the COUNCIL will evaluate the dashboard S long term operational prospects and if realistic, will initiate efforts to secure the lesser cost of maintenance funding for future years.