(03/15/23)

By Lance Cherry, Council for the Advancement of Hunting & the Shooting Sports 

Lance Cherry, ACI President

When is the last time you visited the R3 Clearinghouse? If you haven’t checked it out in a while, it may be time to start getting familiar with the platform once again.

This year, ACI received a Multistate Conservation Grant to work with DJ Case and the Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports (Council) on gathering and producing a recruitment, retention, reactivation (R3) photo collection that will elevate the resource the largest free, open-source digital asset collection for our wildlife and natural resource agencies to use. (A shout out to our Grants Committee Chair, Jenifer Wisniewski, for putting this one together!)

Images covering everything from hunting and shooting sports to boating and fishing will soon be available in a single, easy-to-access location.

In preparation of the massive expansion, marketers from agencies, non-governmental organizations and industry worked with the Council to help streamline and improve the metadata categories assigned to each asset. The improvements work to help make the search engine more efficient and useful. Already there are over 3,500 digital files covering everything from advertising, outreach and promotional products to programs, research, photos, illustrations and more. By the end of the year, this grant project will more than triple the resources, pushing the collection to over 10,000 assets.

The result should help many of you with easy access to the images and ideas you want to help spark creativity. It is our hope you will find the improvements useful in the coming months and the work generated from the grant beneficial to your everyday work.

Additionally, I want to encourage you to upload any assets you are willing to share. The R3 Clearinghouse is a great place to showcase the good work you all do on a regular basis and to help inspire creativity.

To learn more and to access all the resources, visit the Council website at cahss.org and click on the R3 Clearinghouse button at the top or bookmark https://find.nationalr3community.org, and begin exploring the resource that was built for you. Should you have any questions about the R3 Clearinghouse, feel free to reach out to me anytime at lance@cahss.org.