Without more rigorous measurement of effectiveness and disciplined recording of our efforts, how will we know if we are progressing as rapidly as needed to achieve our conservation goals? How will we become more efficient? How will we learn from one another? And how will we be able to demonstrate our achievements and build the public and political will needed to expand our resources and meet the challenges we face? The conservation community urgently needs robust systems for planning, management, monitoring, and learning. We need to base our actions on available evidence wherever possible and adopt a deliberate, adaptive management approach when we must take urgent action with limited information. In all cases, we need to systematically evaluate our results and use this information to learn from one another about what works and what does not work.