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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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