Making public outreach more effective

Although the digital age we live in has a plethora of ways to reach an audience, ensuring a message has genuine impact amid the noise of so many media channels is a tall order.

For agriculture and science communication, at least, busting through the noise can be achieved by delivering more developed, multi-layered experiences. 

That’s what Jacqueline Aenlle, a long-time science and agriculture outreach advocate and assistant professor at the University of Florida, has found.

Why it matters: The agriculture sector devotes significant resources to public outreach. Connecting with wider education opportunities, delivering resources that offer full, immersive experiences, and making those investments more reliable, bring the most benefit.

A native of the San Fransico area, Aenlle developed an appreciation for the farm sector in college while living and working around agriculture students and academics. Her doctoral dissertation focused in part on communications in agriculture, trust in agricultural science, and how universities and researchers can improve messaging given modern communication tools.

Aenlle found that good data was lacking on the effectiveness of different technological approaches to outreach.

“There’s not a lot. There’s nothing about podcasting, how people find information about ag now that we have these technologies… Some of these technologies have been around for decades but we haven’t been looking at how they affect, or how people see and view farmers, ranchers, and scientists,” says Aenlle.

The effectiveness of in-person events is well known, though the expense and difficulty of attracting large groups of people is a major limitation. In a bid to recreate live events as closely as possible, but without the cost, Aenlle and her university colleagues began layering different types of digital engagement into single experiences.

To communicate an often-controversial element of forestry, for example, students were digitally brought to a forest during a prescribed burn. This was done through a combination of short videos, virtual reality and live-streaming on-site interviews with the scientists and professionals involved. Response to this and other “electronic field trips” was overwhelmingly positive, says Aenlle, adding they also proved to be an unexpectedly useful investment once the pandemic arrived.

“We know they work. We know people enjoy and engage with videos, audio, social media, interactive things like virtual reality … Intuitively we’re hoping that means, if we do this at a dairy, or someone that’s growing bell peppers and other interactive experiences, that’s an effective way to get students at a low cost.”

Individual efforts require commitment

Aenlle does her own follow-up by discussing subjects with experts on her podcast “From Urban to Ag.” It’s her way of trying to make the otherwise inaccessible accessible.

“Coming from an urban area, I was the person that had all those misconceptions and fears around food and no awareness of how things showed up in the grocery store. I felt privileged to be able to learn, have a network of people to ask. I wanted to bring that to people who have a similar background to myself,” she says.

“My goal as an individual is to share information with people in an understandable way, and understandable at a foundational level. Being in academia is hard because I don’t know if we always do that … I found there was sometimes judgment for asking basic questions, like, ‘how can you not know how a jalapeno is grown?’”

Like multi-layered events, however, podcasts and other media outreach requires significant resources, specifically time. Based on the science extension programming she and her colleagues have developed through the University of Florida, Aenlle believes there is opportunity for organizations and institutions to develop programs that are more simultaneously more effective and more helpful to content creators.

“You are competing for space on someone’s phone. Some people do a great job of the marketing of their podcast. To have the blog, Facebook, and building the community. It’s hard to do that …

“Again, a lot of these podcasters or advocates are farmers and ranchers doing it on their own. How can these larger organizations better support them, and foster a deeper relationship to support each others’ mission and efforts?”

Enabling grassroots outreach

Supporting individual content creators is one of several strategies that could have a good per-dollar return, according to Andrew Campbell, Middlesex-area farmer and veteran of the agricultural outreach space.

Like Aenlle, Campbell says there’s a significant investment required to be an effective media creator. Particularly for younger people, money for good microphones, cameras and other equipment can be hard to come by. The time needed to produce content that can generate long-lasting impacts is not readily available.

Still, many farmers and others working in agriculture do make the investment. This benefits the industry. Echoing the question posed by Aenlle, Campbell believes agricultural organizations and institutions should more widely recognize the value being generated by those making outreach efforts, and do a better job of enabling more people to engage from a grassroots level.

“If you want people to do that, how are you as an industry going to step up, and also, be OK with a little less control? How can you just bring people up to speed, make them more comfortable with the tools and resources, and let them go?” says Campbell.

More generally, he believes the agriculture and food sector would benefit by discussing outreach strategies with industries like mining and forestry. His experiences in speaking to professionals in both fields indicate the presence of similar — if not more acute — public outreach challenges, as well as opportunity for collaboration.

Steady funds are still key, however

“How many companies, organizations, people — how many go and make a single donation, and feel really good about it, but what’s an outreach group supposed to do with that? They can come up with a strategy, sure, but they know its only going to last a little while,” says Campbell, citing the government of Saskatchewan’s investment in agricultural extension staff — specifically for public outreach — as an example of strategy that could have longer-term positive impact.

“Our sector as a whole needs to understand it’s a long-term commitment … What’s the 20-year goal? It’s making these kinds of initiatives with more of a marketing thought process, asking what’s the long-term plan, not just what a radio ad is going to do for the next three months.”