Going from a great design for GIS to making it happen is an exciting and tricky road. There's no set pathway, but here are some guidelines. 

Find a Great GIS Person and Support Them

The person who will implement your GIS is key. If you don't have them identified, here are some resources to help you find someone.  If you do have a person, it's important to invest in training on a regular basis. If a staffer, it can be very helpful to have a consultant they can turn to for help on problems - plus using support systems at your GIS software vendor.

The expectations the land trust have of the staffer should have been made clear in the needs assessment and the GIS design document. In any case, it's good to allow extra days of time during a startup phase to get settled in well - and to be sure to get agreement on the most important things to accomplish.

Go For Early Results

For most land trusts, the key to implementing a GIS is to begin creating useful products as soon as possible. By strategically choosing which projects can be done early, the implementation effort can gain allies as well as get valuable experience with how the design is going to actually work.

Sometimes early projects can take too much effort – for example, trying to create a parcel map where those boundaries don’t exist yet can be very time-consuming and put an entire project off schedule. Candidates for early work are:  basic property maps for pending projects, simple maps showing the full area of a trust’s work, a map showing the location of all members or donors in an area. 

Organize Your Data and Projects Carefully at the Beginning, and Keep Them Up

In the rush to get on to using GIS, it's easy to neglect careful organization of your data and GIS projects. Establish a solid directory structure early and stick to it.  Be sure to not change your core data to fit just one project (if you do, place it into your Project data folder), and be sure to clean up your temporary and other files as you go. Reinterpreting GIS projects months or years later can be very frustrating if you don't attend to good structure and organization. 

Invest in Effective Graphic Design

While early products are key, it is also important to ensure that a basic “look and feel” has been developed for published maps. This involves creating colors and graphic frames that connect with the land trust’s overall graphic identity, and cartographic conventions (colors, labels, lines, shaded relief, etc.) that are effective and pleasing.  Engaging a designer or a GIS consultant with visual skills to help create basic templates can move this process ahead quickly.  LEARN MORE about how to use effective design in your GIS...

Use Outside Consulting to Fill In Your Capacities

If you do not already have a relationship with a good GIS consultant, a good approach is to ask a couple of consulting candidates to do small projects for you (probably $1-1,500 range). While some consultants will not be able to do such small projects, that in itself is important to know. Larger land trusts may choose a more traditional route of asking for proposals from a number of consultants.

Key qualities in good land trust GIS consultant include:

• Connection with your issues – are they members of your land trust, are they engaged with similar efforts anywhere else?
• GIS capacity – test their skills by asking about particular projects and exploring not only how they did the GIS work but how the relationship went with the client.  Ask about problem projects and follow up with references.
• Adaptability – are they committed to doing it their way, or do they probe for your needs? Does their billing practice allow for you to learn and change your mind on projects?
• Data and analysis – do they have the datasets that you will need for your projects? Can they find workable substitutes for data they don't have?
  
• Conflicts – do they work for interest that might create the appearance of conflicts of interest?  Conversely, does the consultant work with other groups whose GIS work can help your own efforts ("convergence" of interest)? 
• Communications – do their map products communicate effectively? Do they understand the audiences with whom you need to communicate?
  

Choosing consultants who will work hourly can be a good approach initially.  That way you can control tasks and costs.  After you build a solid relationship, you can set up more extensive contracts for scopes of work.  Rates can range widely, depending on skills, seniority, desire and area of the country.  Most longstanding GIS consultants will probably charge in the range of $50-100 per hour, unless they have a special community rate.

Engaging a consultant to provide a broad, contract-based scope of services at the outset is something that only GIS-experienced land trusts should attempt.  In the early stages of a GIS system, it is important to have maximum flexibility and a set contract may be difficult to rearrange.

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