Behavior Change Concepts
Motivations First
Effective communication begins with understanding your intended audience. In persuasive communications, the next step is to understand what motivates people to take the actions we are promoting. In this short … Continue reading
Practice Characteristics
A wide range of factors can influence a farmer or landowners’ decision to adopt a new practice, but perhaps among the most important are the perceptions and attitudes people hold … Continue reading
Theory of Planned Behavior
Information alone is often not enough to influence a behavior change. Understanding how people actually make decisions is crucial for developing the right message to engage and influence your intended … Continue reading
Diffusion of Innovations
The Diffusion of Innovations model provides a visual understanding of how new ideas, technologies, or in our case, conservation agriculture practices, spread through a population. It also helps us segment … Continue reading
Outreach Planning
Planning for Outcomes
Effective outreach begins with planning. Your farmer engagement activities—field days, winter workshops, newsletters, social media posts—should all be designed strategically to accomplish your conservation goals. It is important to keep … Continue reading
SMART Planning: Designing Effective Outcomes
To be truly effective planning tools, your goals and desired outcomes need to be focused and measurable, so you can determine whether you are actually achieving them or not. The … Continue reading
Messaging for Conservation Events
Planning conservation outreach events requires not only thinking about logistics (demonstrations, presentations, food, etc.) but also the speakers and communication frames we are going to incorporate. This worksheet can be … Continue reading
Evaluation
Evaluation Idea: Exit Tickets
Keeping event evaluations short is often a successful strategy in getting audiences to complete them. Providing an incentive to complete them is another good strategy. Exit tickets tick both of … Continue reading
Evaluation Example: Plus/Delta
Sometimes you may just need some quick feedback about the positive and negative impressions of your events. If you only need some basic feedback from your audience, you may want … Continue reading
Using Interviews to Evaluate Outreach Programming
There are many ways to evaluate conservation outreach efforts. Most often, people lean toward things they can measure with numbers: how many people attended events, social media engagement, or how … Continue reading
Communications
Social Media Planning
After determining your communication plan, it is time to create your social media plan and start pushing content! During your brainstorming process, you want to keep in mind the different … Continue reading
Communication Design
After determining your audience and planning your schedule, it’s time to design! Design is where you get to let your organization’s personality shine. Posts and their designs should fit into … Continue reading
Communication Pathways
Figuring out where your audience is and what messages resonate the most with them is a key component of our training. Determining the platforms that your audiences use the most … Continue reading
Outreach Examples
Event Flier: Women Caring for the Land
Targeting specific audiences is a great example of using framing to reach new audiences. Women landowners are typically an underserved demographic that may find comfort in being in like-minded groups … Continue reading
Event Flier: Let’s Talk Weather
Weather and climate can be tricky topics to broach based on varying opinions and ideas of what extreme weather actually is. Hosting a listening session is a great way to … Continue reading
Event Flier: New Ways and New Challenges
Risk management can be one of the harder events to draw in new audiences. This example from Between the Lakes Demonstration Farm Network highlights the idea of equipping farmers with … Continue reading
Event Flier: Supper and Soil
We love using food as a way to draw people in! This event does that by including “supper” in the title. The event is family-friendly, featuring a bbq dinner, soil … Continue reading
In Action
Outreach In Action: Tammy and Darwin
Tammy and Darwin’s families go way back, having farmed together in central Iowa for generations. Their working relationship, built on trust and shared goals to be productive and right by … Continue reading
Outreach In Action: Solving Problems With Cover Crops
Sharing the numerous benefits of cover crops isn’t always enough. By framing a practice as a solution to a specific operational or resource problem your audience has, you can provide … Continue reading
Outreach in Action: The Roots
Effective outreach begins with being able to tell your “why”. This could include your reasons for conservation specifically, or for farming in general. Women Food & Ag Network’s (WFAN) Stewardship … Continue reading
Links
Conservation Decision Support Tools
Implementing conservation practices can be a complicated process, requiring access to numerous types of information to make the best decisions in a given production system. Numerous decision support tools exist … Continue reading
Outreach and Communication Resources
Finding high quality conservation images, infographics, or figures can be a challenge. Many of these resources exist (see the Outreach Examples page for many of these!), but locating them can … Continue reading
General Conservation Information
Implementing conservation practices can require significant technical skill and information. Luckily, there are numerous resources out there that provide information about how to implement, manage, and improve conservation and soil … Continue reading
Cover Crops
There are many fantastic resources about cover crop benefits, species selection, and management. These are some of the most useful websites, fact sheets, and organizations supporting this important soil health … Continue reading