Overcoming the funder’s dilemma

For the past decade, the Conservation Measures Partnership’s Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation have helped NGOs improve the design and implementation of projects, and measure results. We show how the Open Standards can be used to make better conservation investments as well. We introduce a risk assessment tool that serves to identify issues that inhibit success if not sufficiently addressed and a scorecard for tracking progress towards goals. We report on 25 of the 28 programs managed by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) that had metrics in place to assess performance. 76% of these programs were on track or further along than expected, while 24% were behind expectations. We argue that scorecards and internal assessments are useful components of a monitoring and evaluation framework, which allows for the early detection of problems. Programs that are behind should not be confused with failures; indeed, there are benefits for the conservation community to move beyond the labels of success and failure. We discuss real-world trade-offs in conservation science due to limited resources. Finally, we suggest ways to avoid what we call the funder’s dilemma—where donors feel they either have to adopt monitoring protocols that are too expensive or rely on potentially biased data.