Many state agencies have struggled to accurately track license sales trends and participation patterns in a timely manner, plus they are unable to find a way to track the effectiveness of their R3 efforts. Enter data dashboards – A tool that enables state agencies to focus their limited R3 resources on areas that need it most. Data dashboards are interactive, visual displays of license data that help enable state agency staff to easily investigate trends and patterns in participation.

These dashboards provide an overview of metrics such as participation, recruitment and license renewal rates, broken down across categories such as age, residency and gender. The Wisconsin DNR, during the development of their dashboard, requested greater detail, wanting the ability to track trends across single or multiple counties and to break down license buying habits for specific user groups, such as separating female license buyers by age. In response to the Wisconsin DNR’s request, Southwick Associates developed the enhanced data dive tool for dashboards.

The new Data Dive allows agency staff to view metrics such as participation or renewal, broken out by one or multiple categories including gender, age, residency, avidity, location and others. This tool also allows staff to instantly create graphs illustrating the data of interest, so that trends among specific groups can be easily identified and compared. Below is a visual example from the electronic Data Dive tool that was created for Wisconsin DNR.

While the Data Dive tool was originally created by Southwick Associates to meet the needs of the Wisconsin DNR, it is now available as a natural extension to the fishing and hunting license data dashboards we have created for other state agencies. As a package, these two products provide valuable insights needed by state agencies to evaluate trends and identify patterns in fishing and hunting participation. For more information about data dashboards in general, or the data dive tool specifically, please contact Lisa Parks at Lisa@SouthwickAssociates.com.