After being unsuccessful with my attempts to get Nick Pinizzotto, the CEO of the jointly formed organizations, Quality Deer Management Association and National Deer Alliance, to give me any clue on the new name of the conservation organization, we all find out in today’s wires. The newly minted name of “National Deer Association” is a perfect blend of the two names with, hopefully, a clearer direction for the organization to launch in 2021. (By the way, if you want hear Nick dodge my questions, while drinking wine nonetheless, listen to Eps 9 of my “Off the Record” podcast.) Onward to our questions! – Michelle Scheuermann, editor, Archery Wire.

Q1: Nick, you mentioned in the news release (see above) that, “We made a lot of tough decisions that better position us to achieve our conservation message.” Can you expand on those decisions? What did you have to let go of? What did you have to create? And how did COVID and where we are in 2020 affect those decisions?

Over the years the expenses of warehousing and distributing merchandise, much of it to support a traditional banquet fundraising system, became overwhelming. If you’re not careful, you can easily outnumber your conservation-focused staff members with those dealing with sales and fundraising. Obviously those things are important because we have to pay for our mission-related work, but we believe the changes we made will be more effective and efficient. We have to modernize, and I think the pandemic made a lot of organizations realize that. For the foreseeable future, large in-person fundraising events are off the table. While we expect in-person events will still be part of our future, we will no longer require our Branches to hold one.

We also made the decision to sell our national headquarters. While having an impressive building can be beneficial, it’s also very expensive and that means less money to advance our mission, which is why we exist in the first place. For every decision we make we have to ask ourselves how it’s going to advance our mission. That’s priority one. Many of our employees are already working remotely and that has gone really well. We feel it’s the responsible thing to do and it meets with our plans for efficiency and cost effectiveness.

Q2: Speaking of COVID, many NGO’s are struggling as they are unable to host banquets and gatherings like in year’s past to raise funds. How does National Deer Association’s model of funding work in light of these changes?

We’ve had a lot of success with online or virtual fundraisers. The more experience we have with these the better we’re getting at them and we expect that to continue. We also have a paid membership and the addition of new members as well as renewals has helped. Our corporate sponsors and local Branches have been very supportive as well. We still look forward to when our Branches can hold in-person events, and when that day comes they’ll have the flexibility to hold events that work best for their areas.

Q3: I am happy to see you are keeping the “Field to Fork” program as one of your focused pillars moving forward. Can you share how that program could evolve now with all the new hunters we’ve seen in 2020?

The sky is the limit with Field to Fork and we’ve even been able to hold some socially-distanced hunts this fall. The program was set to take off even before the pandemic but there’s no doubt that there’s even more interest now. We have a lot of exciting things planned for this area of our work that we’ll be announcing a little further down the road, but our commitment to the program and the R3 effort broadly has never been stronger. We get a lot of great notes from people who participated in one of our programs and also from adults who are interested in hunting and are looking for a mentor, and they inspire us to do even more.