Checking In With The NDA

In this episode of the Nine Finger Chronicles podcast, host Dan Johnson speaks with Nick Pinizzotto, CEO of the National Deer Association (NDA). They discuss the evolution of the NDA following its merger with the Quality Deer Management Association (QDMA), the organization's broader conservation initiatives, and the challenges of balancing diverse interests within the hunting community. Nick shares insights on the NDA's growth, demographic shifts in membership, and the importance of engaging a wider audience in deer conservation efforts. In this conversation, Nick Pinizzotto discusses the National Deer Association's priorities in wildlife management, the modernization of conservation efforts, and the balance between operational costs and funding for programs. He emphasizes collaboration with other deer organizations, the importance of political advocacy, and engaging hunters in legislative action. Looking to the future, he highlights initiatives aimed at deer management and addressing access issues for hunters, ultimately conveying a positive outlook for the hunting community.

Takeaways:

• The NDA is entering its fifth year since the merger with QDMA.
• The mission focuses on ensuring the future of wild deer and habitats.
• The organization is expanding its conservation initiatives beyond deer hunting.
• Balancing the interests of different types of hunters is challenging but necessary.
• The NDA has seen significant growth in membership and donor support.
• Digital outreach has become a key focus for the NDA's communication strategy.
• A free membership option has been introduced to engage more supporters.
• The demographic of NDA members is becoming more diverse and younger.
• The organization aims to educate the public on the broader value of deer in conservation.
• Inclusivity in the hunting community is a priority for the NDA. Our first priority is helping state wildlife agencies manage effectively.
• Modernizing our approach has significantly increased our reach.
• 90% of our funds go directly to our mission.
• We maintain a lean operation to maximize impact.
• Collaboration with other organizations is essential for deer conservation.
• Political advocacy has been strengthened under the new NDA.
• Engaging hunters in legislative action is crucial for wildlife management.
• Future initiatives will focus on antlerless deer harvest and habitat improvement.
• Access to quality hunting land remains a challenge for many hunters.
• It's a good time to be a deer hunter with ample opportunities.

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Dan Johnson (00:01.162)
All right, everybody, welcome back to the Nine Finger Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Dan Johnson. And today we are joined by Nick Penezotto, the CEO still, the head guy over there at the National Deer Association. Nick, man, long time no talk.

Nick Pinizzotto (00:19.756)
Yeah, good to be back on here with you, Dan, and looking forward to the conversation.

Dan Johnson (00:24.704)
Yeah, we're gonna start this conversation out though with you mentioned, hey, I was trying to blur my screen, but I can't do it. Two things, you're a Pittsburgh Steelers fan it looks like.

Nick Pinizzotto (00:38.446)
yeah, it's a struggle lately, but yes. Yep.

Dan Johnson (00:42.336)
Yeah, okay. And then you have some baseball cards behind you or some kind of sports cards behind you that look like they are important because they're on stands and in cases. Who are they?

Nick Pinizzotto (00:58.156)
Well, there's a there's a good mix back there. And so, yeah, I have you see my terrible towel. That's because I live in the the Pittsburgh region. So that makes sense. The cards that were from other primarily baseball, another one of the too many hobbies that I have. And so they are some players from the past. There's some old stuff, but also some new stuff. So, you know, if you're in Pittsburgh and you like the Pittsburgh Pirates, you don't like winning or don't care about winning that much. You better like

Dan Johnson (01:27.362)
Hahaha

Nick Pinizzotto (01:28.288)
some of the other people. And so I've got guys like, you know, David Wright, autograph card from the Mets, who I always thought had the best right handed swing in baseball. I've got, of course, you got to have a Tony back there. Ali De La Cruz from Cincinnati and some of the, you know, sort of some of the emerging stars or some of the old stuff. I've got some old football stuff back there. But of course, you know, Paul Skeen is the one thing we do have to look forward to here in Pittsburgh. I've got a few of him back there.

So it's just a hodgepodge.

Dan Johnson (01:59.905)
Yeah, me and my brother, my dad, every single year since I believe 1986, so I would have been six years old, my dad got me and my brother a full set of baseball cards every single year, all right? And so we had a, we just got all these baseball cards. We didn't really know like when.

Like who was going to be what we didn't really follow it as far as our favorite team was the St. Louis Cardinals. My dad was a Cardinals fan. My dad was also a Minnesota Twins fan. and so of course we had a lot of like Ozzie Smith. had Jose Akendo, Willie McGee. We had a Kirby Puckett. We had, now I'm forgetting that first Chuck Knoblock from, from Minnis. Yep. All those guys. And then of course, what was it?

Nick Pinizzotto (02:48.644)
yeah.

Dan Johnson (02:53.759)
this past summer where he still has all that stuff. It's in containers. So we have like, man, 10, 15 years of baseball cards just stacked in part of his basement. And so we decided to go through them and we're looking at like, I ran into Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card, you know? Yeah. And so that dude was an idol to a lot of kids from the late 80s and early 90s. And so,

Nick Pinizzotto (03:12.728)
Yep, I got one of those back there.

Dan Johnson (03:23.259)
We it was pretty cool to go back through those and kind of relive your youth And now you don't even need a becket anymore to go and check your baseball card price You can scan it on your phone and then do a google search for it And it'll allow you to kind of check the price the going rate of some of these things I think I might even have like a shakil o'neil My brother was basketball. So he might have shakil o'neil kobe bryant rookie cards type of deal too and so

It was fun to dig through those and even some of the old comic books that we used to collect when we were kids.

Nick Pinizzotto (03:59.318)
Yeah, the game's completely changed. used to be when I was a kid, know, common cards had some value back then. Nowadays, common cards aren't worth the cardboard they're printed on. And so it's all about chasing hit cards, and it's a very modern way of doing it, getting parallels. And I mean, we could have a whole show talking about sports cards, but I still like the old stuff. I don't get into...

Dan Johnson (04:01.874)
yeah.

Dan Johnson (04:14.484)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Pinizzotto (04:23.914)
Let's put this way, I enjoy going out and searching and looking for some of the old stuff and things that mean something to me in terms and less about the actual value they bring. I got a few valuable ones, but it's a different game now. It's not as fun really, to be honest with you.

Dan Johnson (04:38.592)
my brother, he does have the famous Billy Ripken card. You know what what's what I'm talking about, right? Right? Yeah.

Nick Pinizzotto (04:44.982)
Hmm. yeah. Well, it's the one that they remade this year. Yeah, with the other kid from from the Orioles. But that's an awesome. Yeah. The fun face card.

Dan Johnson (04:54.29)
Yeah, so he has the original card. Yeah, fun. We'll just we'll put it in fun. Fun face card. And so he you know, he has that card and and I can remember my dad looking at it and goes, I think there's something wrong here. I don't think that should have been on a baseball card. And so he he always kept it away. And there's a couple other pretty sweet cards where it's like when they were cutting them in the factory, they cut like half of

half of another card with another half of a card and it got, like they get mixed up in the, in with all the cards. And so I got one of those that's pretty, pretty rare. I don't know how much that one costs, but I dunno, I had a blast doing that kind of stuff. Okay. Before we get into today's episode though, I am gonna do a quick run through some of the partners here on the Nine Finger Chronicles real quick.

Nick Pinizzotto (05:40.726)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Dan Johnson (05:52.095)
If you are interested in any of these brands, all I'm asking is just to go to the website, take a look at their products, and then just take a look. If you like something, go buy it. First off, if you're looking to get in any type of a saddle, go check out Tethered. They got everything you need as far as saddle hunting equipment, saddle hunting accessories.

In my opinion, one of the best broadheads on the market, Wasp Archery. I do have a discount code NFC20, wasparchery.com. As far as optics are concerned, along with their VIP warranty, Vortex Optics is numero uno in the optics game, especially for outdoorsmen. Vortexoptics.com. Code blue scents.

Really starting to fall in love with using mock scrapes and other synthetic and real scents to try to lure deer in closer to my stand locations. Code blue scents dot com, discount code NFC20. Huntworth is a very unique product because they still hold a really good, they're very affordable, but at the same time I would put them up there with any

one of the elite brands that are on the market. And then last but not least, a trail camera that is very easy to set up. And really when I'm looking for a trail camera, I am looking for it to take pictures of deer. Very simple, very basic, and reveal trail cameras do that. So go to tacticam.com slash cameras and check out their new 3.0 versions. And then of course full sneak gear, my t-shirt company.

My apparel company go check it out badass stuff there Nick it's been a while since we've talked. Okay, and Basically what I want to do today is is I want to talk about the NDA I want to talk about what you guys have been doing the past handful of years and And how you guys because the big news a while ago was you know QDMA went away everybody knows that you guys are

Dan Johnson (08:02.608)
a brand new organization now. You've been a brand new organization. You've been at this organization for a while now. Talk to us a little bit about what's been going on the last three, two, three years. How this transition has went. We're past being new at this point. And then eventually we're gonna end up talking about what does the future hold. So any update would be appreciated.

Nick Pinizzotto (08:32.43)
Yeah. And so hold onto your seat. It's actually, we're going into our fifth year since the merger. Um, and I w I was, um, doing something, but I got a notification from LinkedIn that it said, Hey, you know, you've been in this job for nine years now and I almost fell out of my chair. So, um, yeah. So the old, uh, national dear Alliance and the QDMA, we merged back, uh, over four years ago now. It seems kind of crazy. And so I wouldn't say

Dan Johnson (08:37.531)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Pinizzotto (09:00.61)
you know, use the word brand new. Some things are certainly brand new, but we also still, you know, rest on the pillars of what the QDMA was all about. And that's healthy deer, healthy habitats, and hopefully, satisfied hunters out there. And so those things have never changed, which is good. You know, our mission is ensuring the future of wild deer, wildlife habitat and hunting, which is very similar to what the QDMA mission was. And so a lot of that remains the same. A lot of the staff.

the long tenured staff that were with QDMA for many years, highlighted really by Lindsay Thomas, Kip Adams, Matt Ross, April Robertson has been here a long time now and others, Brian Grossman. They're still with us and doing great things. So that's all the same, but a lot of things have changed too. Certainly our business model is a little bit different now. Just even going back to the mission, when the QDMA started,

That was a time when the overwhelming majority of deer being shot in the country were 18-month-old deer. And so we had very young herds. We didn't have many mature deer in the herd. And this was across the country. And so the QDMA came along and said, well, we can have better hunting, but we certainly can have better, healthier herds with better age-class structure in those herds. And also it's okay to shoot a doe.

It really wasn't all that long ago that people really either didn't have opportunity or were really reluctant to shoot a doe. And so the QDMA deserves a lot of credit over its 30 plus year history of educating people about that. Now, if you look at our deer reports that we've been doing for a long time, the majority of deer that are shot are in older age classes, which is good for, you know, age class balance in the herd. It certainly makes for better hunting those of us that have

had the fortune of seeing and pursuing and even every once in a while tagging a mature deer knows that that's a completely different deer than the 18 month olds that we used to chase when we were younger. And so that's exciting and fill in the freezer with does. And actually we're on a bit of a campaign right now to really push people to shoot more does because I'll say we probably took our foot off the gas on that a little bit. And now we've got situations where there's so much buck focus that now we're having degraded habitats over unbalanced deer herds.

Nick Pinizzotto (11:23.198)
And so anyway, longer story short, the QDMA kind of achieved its mission. And so we got to that point we were doing the merger where we needed to do more things and different things, broader conservation type things, sort of reinvent ourselves, not lose focus on what we did to get where we did, but start looking at bigger picture things that we need to work on. So for example, one of our major initiatives we do now, and this is something that was important to me when we did the mergers, I wanted to do more

on the ground led work from our national office. We have branches all across the country and that's great and they do a lot of on the ground work, but I wanted our national office to lead on the ground outcomes. And so we're involved in this very large and successful initiative with the U.S. Forest Service going out and improving public lands through timber harvest, through improving access, tangible on the ground things. So we're actually facilitating timber harvests all across the country. We've got, you know,

really 20 plus agreements across the country with the Forest Service, that's only growing. We're very close to achieving our million acre goal that we set three years ago of improvements. And that's all led by our national office. And we just didn't do a ton of that in the past. Our field to fork program has continued to grow. That was something that started with the QDMA, but we've certainly picked up and sort of.

Dan Johnson (12:37.947)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Pinizzotto (12:49.11)
Applied additional resources to that. We now have field to fork coordinators in different places of the country, which we didn't have before getting people Teaching people to hunt that have never had the opportunity to and it's not a youth program. There's plenty of those out there We're talking about adults You know, it's amazing how many adults that never never hunted were never asked to hunt would really love to hunt and want to try it they want to go out and get their own food that type of thing and so

Dan Johnson (13:08.666)
Okay.

Nick Pinizzotto (13:13.894)
You know, we're doing a lot of events across the country and we're sharing our model with other organizations to do it because we know that we can't do them all ourselves. So that's certainly been a big initiative. know, broader conservation stuff. We did a really cool project in collaboration with the Fish and Wildlife Service in all of the southeastern states. Broadly, we termed our Southeast Deer Project, but we put out a really cool film called Wild Tail.

And what that film and what that project sought to do was to impress upon people the broad value of deer to all of conservation. You know, and I, Dan, you know, we're rednecks at heart, OK? So we're focused primarily on, you know, chasing and shooting the things, right? But deer have such value beyond that. You if you consider eight out of every 10 people that buy a hunting license are doing so because they want to hunt deer.

Dan Johnson (13:56.494)
you

Right.

Nick Pinizzotto (14:10.382)
That's a lot of money generated for all of wildlife conservation. Pittman Robertson Act dollars, people that are buying guns to hunt, they're buying, largely buying rifles to hunt deer. Not that they're not buying shotguns to hunt turkeys and waterfowl and all that, but when you combine all those other types of hunters into their own group, it still doesn't come close to what deer hunters bring to the table. Not to mention, we buy land, we do habitat work on the ground, and this habitat work does not just benefit deer.

Dan Johnson (14:20.495)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Pinizzotto (14:39.36)
Okay, it benefits a whole host of species. And so it's really trying to impress upon people, deer are valuable to all of us, even if you have no intention of hunting one. And so it's kind of a dream of mine that we start growing our membership with people who just care about deer. They understand the value of hunting and they care about hunting, but they don't necessarily care to even shoot a deer themselves. Those are the people we're trying to reach now we're starting to have some success with that. I just shared with our board of directors this morning.

our results from 2024 in terms of our growth, in terms of eyeballs, people seeing what we do, and we are up exponentially in every category. And we're also finding that our most popular articles tend to be things like, how many spots does the average fawn have? How does a deer see? These types of things. How does deer habitat help monarch butterflies, is an example, because people have that broad interest. So we're not

Dan Johnson (15:28.143)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Pinizzotto (15:37.356)
watering down what we do for deer. We still do that and we do it, you know, it's a very strong part of what we do. But we also, we have a responsibility to do more because deer are so important.

Dan Johnson (15:43.695)
Right.

Dan Johnson (15:48.559)
Right, right. So when you guys are sitting there at the NDA round table and you're having discussions of what initiatives to bring to the table or move forward on, how do you balance these initiatives as far as the rednecks, like who just love to shoot deer and who love to, like maybe the...

And that's even split up, right? The guys who like to fill their freezer versus the guys who are going after mature, big antlered animals. And the demographic that you just were talking about was people who just like deer but don't necessarily like to hunt them. How do you balance that message?

Nick Pinizzotto (16:33.6)
It is very difficult sometimes. As a communicator, Dan, you know this, right? You're trying to come up with topics for each show that are gonna be interesting to your listeners, understanding that out of 10, if you have a listener that's interested in five or six of them, you're doing pretty good. Not everything's gonna appeal to everybody. And so our biggest communication piece is our weekly newsletter.

And I can tell you that, you know, Lindsay and his team and Jennifer was new skill on our team from the marketing side, always trying to figure out what the right balance is. So we try to have a little bit of something for everybody if we can. So for example, you know, how to how to kill a mature buck in the winter is not as irrelevant to somebody that is just learning to hunt and they're happy to fill their freezer with a dough like or prescribed fire or, you know, these types of things. Those are more for the advanced folks.

Dan Johnson (17:20.75)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Pinizzotto (17:25.506)
So it is difficult and we try to do our best to spread that message out. You know, we just had our, we put out an annual call to the staff for ideas for content for the upcoming year and I'm filling out my ideas right now. And I think about those same things that you just said, how do we put information out there that's relevant to most people? You know, and the other thing too, I think one of the things that sort of happened with the QDMA and why we thought we needed to change our name was that unfairly,

it kind of got tagged as a big buck organization. you know, big bucks are, mature bucks are a outcome of good deer management practices. They weren't the goal. And so, you know, we, we still believe that's what I hunt. You know, I, I love chasing mature deer, but at the same time, I'm just as tickled for a new person hunting that shoots a young deer, anybody that just shoots one.

you know, that fills their freezer. And so it's a tough balance. That's a good question. It's not easy.

Dan Johnson (18:26.009)
Yeah, and so like to elaborate just a little bit on that with, you I definitely felt like the old QDMA was a big buck type organization, but not just big buck or organization. I think I felt like it was a private land owner slash leaser type user organization. And so then the people who did love

deer hunting per se, that didn't have the ability to do any type of habitat work or didn't have the ability to pass small deer or whatever the case is, may have felt like that wasn't necessarily a organization for them. But I think this rebrand is more inclusive to all hunters, not just the private land guy.

Nick Pinizzotto (19:23.02)
Yeah, no, you're exactly right. Yeah, and I should have mentioned that. mean, that certainly was a part of it. I remember when I joined the QDMA back in my 20s, which has been a while now. I've had 20s twice in my life, so it's been a while. I kind of felt that way too. was really interested in, you know, letting deer grow and shooting older deer, but I always felt a little bit left out on the land part of it. But then it became kind of a dream of mine to have some land to hunt.

and to manage. So, but not everybody's like that. Like you said, some people are mostly public land hunters, but then again, I did just mentioned our forestry initiative is our public lands initiative. That's all public lands trying to improve public lands for hunters. So that's a big piece of it. And so, yeah, I mean, we're, certainly broader than that, but at the same time, we can, we have our, our deer steward program and our habitat modules where we can teach you to manage land too. So we still do that part of it.

Dan Johnson (20:20.844)
Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to where we are now, is there any other big stepping stones that happened in the last five years that have gotten the NDA to where they're at today that played kind of like a pivotal role in in the organization or made any big moves for the people who are donating, who are members of this organization?

Nick Pinizzotto (20:51.046)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, we've gone through a fair amount of change, but it's been good. would say, I mean, it's not even arguably, if you look at everything from our financials and the tangible things we've accomplished, we've had probably the best four-year run in the history of this organization. And I think it's because we've been able to sort of spread our mission a little bit wider to bring in more of this broader conservation work.

That has certainly brought more eyeballs to us. also, we did something at the time that I think people were, some people were skeptical of and whenever we did away with our paper magazine. And I'll even tell you, I kind of miss holding onto that thing too, but I also increasingly read more and more of my magazines on my iPad or my computer. And I don't miss having stacks of magazines around. But anyway, the reason I bring that up is,

we then were able to refocus all that time on digital and whether, someone's listening to this right now, they've in some way made transition to a digital information gathering environment. Podcasts are a big part of that. But it allowed our team to focus solely on digital and do some really creative things. mean, my goodness, we have a really good TikTok account, which, you know, it seems crazy.

And Lindsay probably thought I was crazy whenever we were talking about it at first, but now it's funny because he's like our most prolific poster on there because it's reaching the masses. It's reaching people who are interested and curious about deer and want to learn. But we do really well with digital. So I think that's that's a big swing. have in terms of donors, we have more people that have given to us more individuals give to us than ever, ever have in the past. And it's significantly higher.

And part of that just is we've invested in, you we have a professional fundraising person that came to us with tons of experience and institutional knowledge. she, Lauren Varner has, you know, really built that for us. We didn't have that before. We had people that did fundraising and absolutely could spread the message of what we do, but that's not the same as having somebody that is specifically trained and knows, you know, how to do that work. so...

Nick Pinizzotto (23:06.882)
you know, things like cleaning up databases and just being more sophisticated, that has helped a ton. And so sometimes it's not, you know, you're building a house, everybody sees the final product, they see the outside, they don't want to talk about the plumbing and the, you know, pouring the footer and all these types of things. We did a lot of that that people never saw that is translated into more people seeing our stuff, more people.

Getting involved in what we do. We rolled out a free membership. We have a membership level that's free and people said well How could you ever do that? Well when you look at it most organizations whether or not they want to admit it or not They actually lose money on paid memberships Whereas we have all these people that they may not buy a $35 membership card but they sign up for our newsletter become a free member and They buy $250 worth of raffle tickets in a year to support something we're doing

Dan Johnson (24:00.245)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Pinizzotto (24:00.298)
And so it's just an all, it's just we're now counting the people who support us and who believe in what we do and follow what we do differently than worrying about whether or not we send them a 10 cent plastic membership card. So it's just a different way of doing business, being more sophisticated. I think that we're ahead of our peers in a lot of ways. I get calls from my peers, other CEOs asking, for example, how did you...

Dan Johnson (24:12.724)
Right.

Nick Pinizzotto (24:25.632)
Survive getting rid of your physical headquarters and because we did that too. We sold land that we had because my point was Way less than 1 % of our members would ever see a building that was costing us a whole heck of a lot of money It's harder to get talent from different places in the country when you're asking them to move to a place. Let's not let's let's widen You know our area we can recruit good people and not waste a bunch of money on physical buildings and land we don't need

Dan Johnson (24:29.782)
you

Nick Pinizzotto (24:54.434)
and let's put that money into the mission and I think it's really paid off.

Dan Johnson (24:58.133)
How has your demographic changed since this? I my gut tells me we're seeing a younger age group become more relevant here.

Nick Pinizzotto (25:14.274)
You know, if we were to just look at our database right now, I'm still certain that it skews 40 and above, and the people are gonna look a lot like us for the most part. However, it is certainly more diverse age-wise, demographically than it ever has been. And part of it is because of the broad outreach of what we do. And so we are heading in a more of a younger direction. think younger people

know, particularly I filled the fork program. You know, lot of those people are coming to us are either in college, just out of college, or short of 40 years old, which really we would consider younger at this point for our hunting demographic. And so that's a good sign. And you know, the things like value of deer and traditional archery, which is something I'm, you know,

really getting back into is there's so many more younger people getting into that because it's just cool. And so I think we are headed in a positive direction, but it's just, it never moves as fast as what we would like it to.

Dan Johnson (26:22.133)
Yeah. Let me ask you this question. It just popped into my head and maybe it has something here. Maybe there's something here, but maybe there's not. We have groups of hunters that are, let's just say anti-crossbow, pro compound, anti-gun. There's all these different splits in the hunting community.

that some keyboard warriors might be a little aggressive on. Do you guys have meetings where you take a stand on something like baiting or cell cams or strategies like that? Or are you guys trying to be as inclusive as possible?

Nick Pinizzotto (27:12.822)
Yeah, we're definitely it's to each his own type of organization. Okay. Our first priority is helping state wildlife agencies manage the way they need to manage. And we like them to make those decisions. You know, whether or not somebody shoots a deer with a crossbow or a rifle, you know, it doesn't matter to us. It's about opportunity. We want people to have the opportunity to hunt. We want people to have a good experience when they hunt. And that's

Never we never have a meeting for example where we say hey, we're take a stand on crossbows today or we're gonna Take a stand on you know, what baiting and feeding you brought up to you. That's another interesting one You know, I grew up in Pennsylvania. I haven't lived here my whole life. I Subsequently lived in states where you were allowed to bait But I never took up to practice myself but Don't care if others in states that allow it do

you know, they're allowed to do it. It's very cultural in some areas. The only place we get involved with something like that is in disease areas. You know, there's plenty of science out there that shows, you know, bait piles where you got multiple animals sticking their face in one particular place is really bad for spreading all types of things from CWD to any other kind of disease a deer can get or even worse, you know, some of these, we've all seen them where someone's had a mineral lick in the same place for.

X number of years and there's a big pit of stagnant water with minerals in it that deer come to. Those are not the healthiest things. And so if you're in a disease management area, it's not good from that standpoint. But if you're not in one of those areas and you're allowed to do it in your state, I that's that's your prerogative.

Dan Johnson (28:56.263)
Right, right. Okay. outside of that, what, what are some, what are some, any, any other cool things that have happened over the last couple of years that have really gotten people interested in the QDMA or any, any projects specifically, cause you, you mentioned working with the forestry service, fish and wildlife organizations. I, and getting habitat.

back to a place where deer could thrive in it. Any other administrative or technology driven incentives or initiatives that you guys have accomplished over the last couple of years that have gotten people more aware of your organization.

Nick Pinizzotto (29:45.506)
Yeah, I'll go back to something I said earlier. think going, being very modern and going as digital as we can certainly has helped. You know, our magazine that, you know, Lindsay and his team produced was a beautiful magazine. But boy, if you had him on here and you asked him what it took to put that thing together all the time, it was just such a drain. And so I think freeing our people up to be the best they could be. And I think another thing too, you know, we have people in the right seats now.

We didn't always have that before. had people with a lot of different hats on, which we still do. We're still a relatively small nonprofit organization. We don't have a hundred employees here. We're running with like 30 employees, which is good. I want to remain lean. don't see any reason to be big just for the sake of being big. mean, all that does is cost you a lot of money and we don't want to do that. We want to put it into our mission. But that really streamlined things. It really helped us get in front of a lot of people.

Whereas you put a magazine out and you got 20,000 people that may see it, and out of that maybe half of them might actually open the thing. Now we're reaching tens of millions of people in a year on our various platforms. That's, think, a big part of it. I think we just look and feel different now. You open up our website and you're gonna see something about herd health, you're gonna see something about using fire for habitat, you're gonna see something about how to become a new hunter.

So we definitely appeal to a broader audience than we did. And it's gonna take, you know, maybe realistically another probably decade or so to completely prove to people that we're not a big buck only landowner driven organization. But we'll get there. And I see progress in that direction every year. So I don't think it's any one thing, Dan. I think it's just a collection of things that we just do.

Dan Johnson (31:28.499)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Johnson (31:35.911)
Right.

Nick Pinizzotto (31:40.524)
you know, maybe more efficiently have people in the right places. We have really great people. I love our team here. Just such they are, they're hard workers. They care. They're hunters themselves. They live the mission of the organization. And I think that's a big part of our success.

Dan Johnson (31:54.3)
Yeah, yeah, that's huge. You mentioned the word lean, okay? And this is a question that I'm gonna ask because this is what I hear when I talk to other, just day to day, right? mean, I've...

I've done damn near a thousand episodes of the Nine Finger Chronicles. I've talked to just about everybody across the United States as far as regions, conservation efforts, strategy, tactics, stories, gear, everything. And one thing that I have heard brought up in these conversations when it comes to a conservation organization, and you mentioned

the lean try to try to be as lean as possible is balancing operation costs versus the dollar amount that actually goes back to fund programs and and to support the wildlife. Okay. How do you guys balance that operating cost and how much percentage of every dollar actually goes to the the work that is done?

Nick Pinizzotto (33:11.874)
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question. No one ever asked that. And I'm excited to answer it because we have excellent numbers. And I think the first thing overarching, we have had the highest possible rating with Charity Navigator for several years now. Going back to even, I think even before the merger, QDMA I think had it. But ever since the merger, we've certainly had it every single year. So we're a four star rated charity by Charity Navigator. And they look at exactly what you're asking, Dan. They're looking at the efficiency of your organization.

Does your money go toward the cause or is it caught up in a whole bunch of other things? Like if you look at the grade that the Humane Society of the United States gets, for example, it's nowhere near something like ours, thank goodness. And also I would encourage people, people rarely do this. I think people, it's easier for people to sit there and see something that somebody posts and just believe it and then weigh in on it, right? And we're all guilty of that, whether it's me complaining about the Pittsburgh Steelers.

You know or somebody complaining about deer hunting or the state agency or even the NDA? If you go to the deer association website deer association calm and just in the search bar just type in annual reports Our annual reports are right there for you to see and you'll see that Fundraising is an example people might feel like they get a whole bunch of stuff from us and we do hit our database on occasion We've got to raise funds to do our work

But fundraising is far less than even 10 % of what we do. We are an administration. are basically 90 % of that, basically 90 cents out of your dollar goes into the mission, goes into a project, goes into something that we're working on. And that's something that we're proud of. And it's not just us. Like I said, I certainly talk with other CEOs. There are other great organizations that do the same thing.

You know, some are much bigger than us. Like you might look at a behemoth like Ducks Unlimited, okay? But they're a completely different operation. They get a lot of federal dollars. They've got people spread all across the country, lots of partnerships, relationships, but they still do a really good job of focusing that on the mission, even the giant size of their operation. And that's why we have, you know, folks from Ducks Unlimited on our board, because we want to be like our peers in that way.

Nick Pinizzotto (35:34.862)
So I'm really proud of that and it's something like I said we could if we wanted to if my board came to me and said You know, we want to be a 20 million dollar organization There's ways we can do that But they're not going to help deer and they're not going to help habitat. They're not going to help hunters Yeah, you know just another example we had We gained a couple life members this week. We've been selling a lot of life memberships, which is cool

And one of them reached out and had a question about specifically to their land and how they could do things. And immediately they got responses from me, Kip Adams and Matt Ross directly. I want to always be able to do that. You know, I want to always have my email address be put out there and people know that they can contact me and they're going to hear back. You start getting into 60, 100, whatever employees, it gets harder to do that. And so

Dan Johnson (36:24.356)
Right.

Dan Johnson (36:31.012)
Right.

Nick Pinizzotto (36:32.066)
We want to maintain that.

Dan Johnson (36:33.603)
Yeah, that's good to know. Like I look at a 90%. That's pretty damn good, man. I don't see any other organization being as lean as that, profit or nonprofit, whatever. The next thing I wanted to talk about here is, and I believe you had a conversation with me about this.

a long time ago, maybe it was off the record, maybe it was on the record. But there are other. So so right now it's the National Deer Association, right? But there's also the Mule Deer Foundation, right? And we're talking about two completely different species of deer here, two different environments, ecosystems, you know, sometimes mule deer and whitetail cross each other's paths and live in the same places.

Is there a merger there or is there a crossover from like working? Do you work with these guys on a regular basis because they are dear? Talk to us about the, if there is even a handshake between your two organizations.

Nick Pinizzotto (37:47.01)
Yeah, certainly. mean, they, we talk about the forestry and habitat work we do during even Mule Deer Foundation is in even deeper than us. You they've got a Keystone agreement with the Forest Service, which we don't have time to get into what all that means. And so they're doing tremendous things there for Mule Deer specifically. And so, you know, when we're out and about doing our things, right, whether it's in DC or, you know, whether we see each other at a shot show or whatever, we're

worst lock and step on the things that are happening for deer. Now we don't get involved a whole lot in mule deer specific issues other than weighing in on legislation that impacts all deer. When it gets into habitat work, that type of thing, like you won't see us putting out something on here's how to have better habitat for mule deer. They already do that. for a lot of organizations,

You know, there was a struggle coming out of like COVID and whatnot, and they were among them. And at the time, there may have been some people just sort of in the ether talking about what if we just had one deer group? But, you know, both of our organizations really have thrived since that time. And I think there's plenty of justification why they should be separate. You know, mule deer, black tail deer. You know, there are certainly similarities, but they are very different. And so I think it's I think it's helpful to have both. They've done it. They've done a great job.

over there. Greg Sheehan is their new CEO, a great person that I have a ton of respect for. And so yeah, it's a good relationship and I think there's a strong need for both.

Dan Johnson (39:22.447)
Gotcha. Fair enough. Now, the strong suit of the original NDA was dealing with the administrative, dealing with the lobbying, the politicians, the that side of side of things. Is that still a strength with the new NDA, the National Deer Association? are are because I can remember.

It didn't seem like from a lobbying political standpoint, there was a lot of action out there politically for the deer hunter, for the wildlife. Has that changed?

Nick Pinizzotto (40:05.036)
Yeah, as a matter of fact, we have really upscaled what we do in that area. So Katherine Appling Pooler is our, she's in charge of our, basically all of our political action work. Okay, so she handles all of the policy work that we do here. Matter of fact, she right now is in a conference, she's brought up mule deer. She's in a migration conference in California with our friends from the Mule Deer Foundation.

making sure that we are up to speed on things going on there so that we can weigh in on legislation. know, and whenever it was QDMA, know, Kip Adams largely handled a lot of that in addition to all of his other duties that he had to do. You know, you've had Brian Murphy on a couple of times, the former CEO, he was involved with that. He and I actually stayed together in DC, you know, in the past working on those things. so, but it wasn't anybody's just...

total focus. Well, we brought that over from the Alliance. At first it was Torrin Miller, who's now with the Sportsman's Alliance, and we brought Catherine on a little short of a year ago. And so to have somebody fully dedicated to it is absolutely what you need. She has since added three interns that support her. We're trying to get more support in that area because unfortunately, a lot of the fights and things that we get involved in for hunters and habitat and all of that is happening

in a blue collar, excuse me, in a white collar world, it's happening in state legislatures. know, Catherine sent me a list this morning of, here are these 10 action alerts I got to get out this morning. And it's not a joke. mean, it's literally right now, things are going on in state legislatures like crazy. And so it's a huge part of what we do.

Dan Johnson (41:47.937)
Yeah, that world seems very complicated to the rednecks of the world, like myself.

Dan Johnson (41:58.253)
How sneaky, like every time I ever hear about lobbying and bills and things like that, there are portions of bills that are snuck in there last minute, hope, it's almost like they are planning to sneak it under the rug so that nobody knows about it, right? How do you guys even defend that or find out about that kind of stuff?

Nick Pinizzotto (42:23.826)
It's constant. It's all sneaky. I personally despise politics. mean, I certainly am involved in that aspect of our work. I've tested in front of congressional committees and all of that. It is the least favorite thing that I do. But, you know, there's a lot of ways we know about it. Number one, it's not just us. Like we have coalitions that we're part of.

Dan Johnson (42:26.359)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Pinizzotto (42:50.296)
American Wildlife Conservation Partners is a coalition of all of the top conservation groups who also all have people that are looking after these things and become aware of them. Sometimes we might be the ones to sound the alarm, especially if it's like CWD related thing, but sometimes somebody else might sound the alarm. And so that definitely helps. also, with all of our local grassroots network out there, our branches, we have people that can tell us about things that happen at the municipal level.

deer legislation or bad regulations proposed. So do we catch everything? You know, probably not. But for the most part, there's a pretty good network out there that makes sure we know when something's going on and can respond to it. And then sometimes though, to your point, if somebody slips something in at the 11th hour, there isn't always time to respond. And so you just have to deal with it move on when that happens.

Dan Johnson (43:44.267)
Yeah, which is truly unfortunate. Right. And so here in Iowa, I know there's man, there's so many like sneaky things that that happened to the point where now I believe it is there's a couple organizations that have got enough funding to get their own lobbyists. And now instead of wildlife being on the defense.

we're able to take some offense and have really like the Iowa Bow Hunters Association is one of them and really be able to gain some traction with some offensive moves towards stability in law changes and things like that. it's good to see that there is, we're able to start fighting fire with fire at this point.

Nick Pinizzotto (44:34.068)
I mean, I think if you have, I'm sure you have deer hunters listening to your show that they aren't members of NDA for whatever reason. And that's fine. But I, my pitch to any of those folks would be if you don't like anything else we do, it's still worth you signing up because what that does is if we have your email address and we have your zip code, the minute something pops up in your backyard, we will have an action alert showing up in your email. And with that action alert, you're going to be able to, with just two or three clicks.

send a letter off to your legislator on an important issue because rednecks like you and I, Dan, don't want to deal with that. Like we want to be up on what's the latest cool broadhead and how fast is my bow shooting and all this other stuff. And if something comes up that we don't like, it's easier for us to just take a letter that we've already written and then you're able to send that as a constituent. And so, know, Catherine, I know it works very hard at putting together our action alerts and

you know, all these things that go out, she's got a bunch of them out there right now. We make it simple for you. So, you know, get in that network. Like I said, I don't care if you, you want to do, be a premium member and send us 35 bucks, that's great. But I'm more interested in being able to contact you to get you active in these things that matter.

Dan Johnson (45:48.863)
That's right, that's right, that's a fact. All right, the future. What's coming? Anything exciting that we need to be fired up for or joining forces for or programs that you guys are gonna be working on in the next year or so?

Nick Pinizzotto (46:05.198)
Sure. Yeah, like I said earlier, we have a pretty significant initiative right now of trying to encourage people to harvest more antlerless deer. A lot of reasons for that. You know, number one, there in a lot of areas of the country, there's an overabundance issue. It's not everywhere. So if someone's listening to this and you're in one of those areas that you're not seeing many deer, send all your hate mail to Dan, not to me.

Dan Johnson (46:27.915)
Yeah, I'll address it on an individual basis.

Nick Pinizzotto (46:31.884)
Yes, exactly. Now, I mean, in all seriousness, I know it's not one size fits all on that, but in a lot of areas there are too many deer and it's leading to habitat losses, leading to lesser quality hunting, frankly. You can get into that. It's a whole other subject. Also, it helps with disease control. Whether it's CWD, EHD or whatever, mean, one of the reasons you have bad EHD outbreaks is because often there's too many deer and mother nature has a way of dealing with that.

And so it's helpful from that regard. The other thing is, you know, Katherine and her team are working on helping to get some of this extra venison into the food stream as well. So helping people in need in particular. They're putting together a nationwide deer processors map where anybody can go and click on that map and find a processor near them and also find a processor that participates in things like Hunters Feeding the Hungry or whatever local programs that are out there because a lot of people tell us

Well, one of the reasons I don't shoot more deer is because I don't need another one. Well, somebody needs it. And so we want to take advantage of that. So we're really pushing hard on that. You're going to see more of that from us. And you're going to see us get involved in some more broader conservation projects. can't, you know, I teased some of it earlier. I can't get into any, some of the details because we're still waiting to get some contracts signed. But, you know, you're going to see us working on things that help deer, but also help complimentary.

habitat for other species as well. We need to do that. Our deer hunters, more than any other type of hunter, we're the ones out there managing land, manipulating landscapes. We're past the days of everybody needs to have a made-for-television food plot, like you saw back in the late 90s, early 2000s. We're teaching people that you can have food plots. You can actually have native food plots and why those are important. And it doesn't have to be, you you look for a mile down the way and you see

Brassica's, know, pure stands or Brassica standing anywhere. There's a place for that, but we're teaching people about forest stand improvement and why that matters. So you're going to see a lot more of that too, some more of this broader sort of value of deer and encouraging people to hunt. We want to be, we want to be inclusive. We want to get people into the outdoors and we're excited about some of the things we're seeing. I know our Field to Fork program, Elizabeth Klig who runs that.

Nick Pinizzotto (48:55.63)
is going to be really food focused this year. She's excited about some of the things she's going to be doing there. And so it's just a lot of good stuff, Dan. I think we have to be flexible. We need to be responsive. And, you know, we're doing that. I do want to correct something I said earlier, too, because I went to our annual report. I wanted to get this right so I don't get called out. Seven percent in 2023 went toward fundraising. Eight percent went toward management administration. So those, you know, are our accounting people.

customer service people, So 15 % went toward running the organization, 85 % went toward the mission.

Dan Johnson (49:30.505)
Gotcha. Gotcha. Still pretty good.

Nick Pinizzotto (49:35.406)
We're trying.

Dan Johnson (49:36.339)
Yep. Yep. I do have something that popped up in my head and this is something that I, I feel a lot of.

hunters are dealing with. And although we do see tag sales go down throughout a lot of places, we are seeing people still continue to drop out of the wood or woodwork, the hunting army because of access, right? Have you guys done any research that involves the amount of acres a single hunter

uses, like, this is something that I've been thinking about and I call it acres per hunter, right? Especially in a state like Iowa, where I just feel like the big buck, the big buck craze is still a thing. People are trying to soak up as much land as possible in order to manage properties, get bigger antler deer, control their herd, do habitat work, thus causing people to...

like a lot of guys to get displaced, eventually leading to them being removed as a hunter from these analytics. And so have you guys done any research on a hunter per, like a acres per hunter type of deal?

Nick Pinizzotto (51:07.328)
In our deer report, you can get deer hunters per square mile, but that's just a general number based on the number of people that hunt deer in a particular state. The state I'm sitting in, Pennsylvania, has more deer hunters per square mile than any other state. To your point, though, that's not a study that we've done. I hear it discussed. Someone may have done that exact study. It's not coming to me right now.

Dan Johnson (51:13.307)
Okay.

Nick Pinizzotto (51:35.81)
But there's no question it's a factor. It's part of the reason why we have too many does in a lot of areas, Dan, because, you know, let's say we have an outfitter that's controlling thousands of acres and people don't pay the outfitter to come shoot does, they pay the outfitter to shoot bucks. And so even if an outfitter tries to come in after the fact or early season, whatever, to shoot some does, they don't get enough of them. That becomes a challenge. You know, I also think, though,

There's a lot, not for everybody. Again, this isn't a blanket statement, but there are lands out there too that people aren't accessing. And so sometimes it is a real problem for some people, but also a lot of times people overstate what the problem may be. I have people in my own area here to talk about, well, we just don't have the places to go that we used to. And within a very short drive of where I live is over 20,000 acres of state land.

that's available and it's a good hunting land. I I I put cameras out on these lands and see great deer. And you know what I don't see? A whole lot of people, especially after the opening day of the firearm season, it just dies way down. So there's opportunity out there. But there's a whole other discussion and that's quality available land. Not all of it's quality. That's part of the reason why we're doing the Habitat Initiative on public lands because it's, you might have 10,000 acres, but if it's terrible.

Dan Johnson (52:46.801)
Mm-hmm.

Nick Pinizzotto (53:01.986)
bad habitat it's not going to help you so but it's a problem yeah absolutely

Dan Johnson (53:04.613)
Right. It's also an expectation thing, right? Like if you're used to hunting private ground and running into all these good high quality deer and that land sales, you get removed. Your expectations going onto like a piece of public, like you mentioned, may have to change in order for you to keep hunting. And my gut tells me that that's the biggest hurdle for some people is

My experience is going to change, therefore I don't want to participate anymore.

Nick Pinizzotto (53:37.068)
Yeah, I mean, you hear that. Is it driving people out of the sport? I I think it's certainly a factor. Is it the biggest factor? I mean, I think what we see is mostly what's happening is people kind of age out of the sport. You know, I have a perfect example here locally where, you know, someone lost their hunting area and I offered immediately, listen, I got like 10 places I can go show you. And I've never been taken up on it. And so, you know,

There's things I want to do too, but if I don't really if it's not that important to me I'm not gonna put a big priority on it I think that's one of the things that deer hunters people are always amazed that like 1 % of deer hunters will join an organization like ours It's because we have a lot of casual people in our sport You know, there's the folks like you and I that are in that 10 % that we're probably a little bit too crazy about it Then there's another 10 % that's somewhere in the middle and then the rest of them the 80 % are like

Dan Johnson (54:08.902)
I get it.

Dan Johnson (54:14.865)
Mm-hmm.

Dan Johnson (54:31.386)
fact.

Nick Pinizzotto (54:36.302)
They're gonna maybe dust the rifle off, maybe take a shot or two before opening day, which is great. We need those people to do that, but that really is the overwhelming majority of deer hunters. They're casual.

Dan Johnson (54:46.32)
Right, right. Well, great conversation today, Nick. Is there anything else that you want to touch base on before we shut her down here?

Nick Pinizzotto (54:56.162)
No, I don't think so. mean, I think this is good. There's a lot of encouraging things out there. I know a lot of people here, know, chronic wasting disease and that's a downer. Nobody wants to talk about that. And, you there were some EHD outbreaks and so on and so forth. But, you know, it's still a really good time to be a deer hunter. You know, you've got older deer than you've ever had. You've got ample populations, even too ample in some areas.

And our annual deer report is coming out here real soon. You can download that for free on our website. You can see what the trends are across the country. So check that out. I think people sometimes be grateful for what we do have because it wasn't always like this. And we're working really hard to keep it this way.

Dan Johnson (55:40.07)
Absolutely. Nick, doing God's work over there at the NDA, man, huge shout out to you, all of the people that you've mentioned, your entire organization, and thanks for taking time to come on and talk with us today and good luck in 2025, man.

Nick Pinizzotto (55:58.636)
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. We appreciate it.

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