(03/15/21)

By Jenifer Wisniewski, Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency

ACI President, Jenifer Wisniewski

You thought it was turkey season, and while that may be true in many places, the real seasons I hope we are all focused on is ACI awards and grants seasons!

If you are like me, you’re thinking through last year for all the possible entries and narrowing down what you are going to submit. Well, the deadline is drawing oh so near. You have just 12 days left to enter! I hope you will all consider volunteering for judging too. There are a lot of benefits to judging, I get many ideas from seeing the excellent work of our colleagues.

It is also grant season. There is another opportunity for 8 states to receive $15,000 each. Please send us examples of R3 email/text campaigns that worked or didn’t work. The only stipulation is that the program must have been evaluated for results, such as whether goals and objectives were met. Evaluation reports would be ideal – we’ll pull the info we need from that and contact you with any questions.

• Phase 1 will compile examples of past campaigns and identify best practices.
• In Phase 2 we’ll award up to $15,000 per state (8 states total), to test the best email campaign/text components and evaluate. 
• For Phase 3 we’ll compile everything we’ve learned into a clearinghouse resource available to all.

The ACI website has a flyer with more information. If you’d like to be part of this project please let me know ASAP.

Congratulations to the 2021 R3 ACI grant recipients, where the ACI Multistate Grant Committee awarded five $50,000 grants to Louisiana, Idaho, Oklahoma, Connecticut and Nebraska. These applications were the highest quality we have seen, and it was a difficult decision to say the least. We are exploring the possibility of getting more of these application projects funded in 2022. Stay tuned.