Measure

How do we know we are successful?

Measuring the success of our conservation and restoration efforts must be tackled on a project-by-project basis. Coastal Resilience takes a multi-faceted science approach to designing local projects on the ground as well as global indicators of success. To consistently track project outcomes and identify areas for improvement in tool effectiveness and communication of results, we have developed a list of performance measures for the Coastal Resilience program.

As part of this development, we have defined the program within four themes:

The diagram shows the interconnected and iterative nature of the science and technology themes, and the people and business themes are placed as to illustrate the intersection and collaboration among the various stakeholder groups.

Decision Support Technology: the suite of Coastal Resilience tools used to support decision-making to decrease ecological and socioeconomic risks from coastal hazards
Science Application and Modeling: Scientific research and modelling efforts concerning effective conservation and restoration to reduce risk
People and Practitioner: the network of communities, practitioners, and policymakers that use tools to protect people and ecosystems in coastal areas through conservation and restoration of habitats
Business Impacts: emerging stakeholder group of interest that will use tools to take into account nature-based solutions to benefit coastal communities, their bottom line and overall success

Science Publications

Restoration and Conservation Actions

Communities

Within each of these themes, we have identified priority resources inputs and regular activities as well as short, medium, and long-term outcomes. From the full list of outcomes, our team, with review from the Coastal Resilience network, developed 17 priority measures according to criteria including: significance, added value, span of control, feasibility, clarity, comparability, and verifiability. The measures will be collected through a combination of analytics and surveys to both internal and external partners. Semi-annual analytics will be collected, compiled and then shared annually alongside the complete suite of measures of tool effectiveness across the four themes.

Priority Measures:

Search:

Measure	Type	Primary Theme	Methodology category	Unit of Measure	Frequency of collection
Practitioners on network list serve and newsletter recipients	Output	People	Analytics	Number	Quarterly; assess annually
Peer review and other publications	Output	Science application	Analytics	Number	Quarterly; assess annually
Twitter followers	Output	People	Analytics	Number	Quarterly; assess annually
Visitors to mapping sites	Output	Technology	Analytics	Number	Monthly; assess annually
Visitors to website	Output	People	Analytics	Number	Monthly; assess annually
Tool applications and project sites	Output	Technology	Analytics	Number	Annually
Tool applications developed for business audience	Output	Business	Analytics	Number	Annually
Collaborative apps developed	Output	Business	Analytics	Number	Annually
Area covered relative to habitats of concern	Output	Technology	Survey and analysis	Number	Annually
New business partners	Short-term outcome	Business	Analytics	Number	Annually
Agencies and organizations using CR-DST for planning	Short-term outcome	Technology	Analytics	Number	Annually
Local and enterprise partnerships	Short-term outcome	People	Analytics	Percentage and qualitative	Annually
Training participant understanding of CR-DST	Short-term outcome	Technology	Analytics and interview	Number, narrative	Annually
Individuals trained	Short-term outcome	Technology	Survey and analysis	Project examples	Annually
Stakeholder awareness of CR-DST	Short-term outcome	Technology	Survey and analysis	Percentage	Annually
Examples/case studies of CR-DST use	Intermediate outcome	Technology	Analytics, survey	Number	Annually
Demonstrated tool application for site implementation	Long-term outcome	Technology	Interviews	Percentage	Annually

Showing 1 to 17 of 17 entries

Photo credit: Tim Calver