Transparent and unifying collaboration across the USA to revise organizational standards.

 With over 1,100 land trust members across the United States, since 2005 the LTA has been relying on the Land Trust Standards and Practices as the essential policy roadmap to help preserve public trust and run an effective organization. But the advisory team wanted an updated document “of” and “for” the land trust community. The LTA needed a way to collaborate, regardless of timezone or location.

The 62 practices of the Standard were broken into single sentences and presented in rating/social-dialogue boxes. Each person rated their level of support for each statement, added relevant commentary, and replied to or liked other members’ contributions. The open dialogue also enabled the management team to have an evolving record of the evaluation. The completion rate for LTA staff, board members, and consultants ranged from 67% to 82%.

Sentences with low ratings were clear calls for action, indicating which proposed wordings required attention. For this purpose, the LTA drew upon the suggested re-wordings posted by members themselves in Ethelo’s integrated comment boxes. Instead of drawing on one-way insights, this social dialogue functioned as an internal source of cross-validation, allowing the LTA project managers to quickly identify highly-supported concerns and suggestions.

By integrating votes, comments, and their crowdsourced validation, Ethelo enabled an estimated reduction of 154 LTA staff hours (1 Month FTE). This represented an overall 85% time-saving, delivering actionable results faster than conventional methods.