M E A S U R I N G WH AT M AT T E R S I N N O N P R O F I T S
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Despite this apparent success, in the early 1990s Conservancy managers began to realize that bucks and acres didn’t adequately measure the progress of the organization toward achieving its mission. The Conservancy’s goal,
after all, isn’t to buy land or raise money; it is to preserve the diversity of life on Earth. By that standard, the Conservancy had been falling short every year of its existence. It had its successes, but the extinction of species continued to spiral out of control: one Harvard biologist,
In the early 1990s, managers of The Nature Conservancy began to realize that ‘bucks and acres’ didn’t really measure its progress
E. O. Wilson, estimates that the extinction rate today is as high as it was during the great extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
What particularly worried the Conservancy was the fact that species were declining even within its protected areas. For instance, several years after acquiring property around Schenob Brook, in Massachusetts, specifically to protect the remaining bog turtles, the population started to shrink. It turned out that activities outside the preserve were affecting the water on which the turtles depended. In response, the Conservancy revisited its basic strategy. Instead of acquiring and protecting small parcels of land that harbor rare species—a Noah’s Ark strategy—the organization began to work on pre- serving larger ecosystems. This approach might mean looking outside the preserve, at conditions such as economic development, pollution, and soil erosion. It might also mean restoring an area’s natural environmental dynamics by once again allowing wildfires or floods to do their work. Not surprisingly, the old “acres-protected” measure did little to clarify the effec- tiveness of the new conservation strategy. It soon became clear that the “bucks” measure—biased as it was toward raising money for projects that appealed to donors but didn’t necessarily advance the organization’s mission—also left much to be desired. The Conservancy has always maintained that it is in the science business, not the beautification business; protected areas must be chosen for their scientific value, not for their scenic qualities or proximity to major population centers.
In 1996, the Conservancy decided to abandon bucks and acres and to develop a better way of measuring success.
A new framework After spending several years trying out different approaches—including one that involved 98 different metrics—the Conservancy settled on a simple framework for measuring performance. Known as the “family of measures”
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