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Making Extension content more discoverable: Evalua7ng examples from a forestry website Eli Sagor 1 and Philip Potyondy 2 . 1 University of Minnesota Extension and 2 Department of Forest Resources Introduc7on One of Extension’s most important roles is to make complex, research‐ based information more accessible to individuals who can use that information to better their lives. Increasingly, our audiences are using digital media to @ind and exchange information. The recent proliferation of new digital communication tools creates new opportunities for Extension professionals to make our content more discoverable to people who need it, when they need it. The purpose of this poster is to offer insights from one Extension program that has made heavy use of digital communication technologies to increase content discoverability. The poster is designed to illustrate some techniques to increase content discoverability online, and provide insight on returns, for one Extension project. While we do not have impact evaluation data at this point, the data presented here do offer useful insight into returns on investments made to deploy a variety of online communication tools. Why “discoverability?” While not necessarily an end in itself, making content more discoverable makes it more likely that the content will @ind its way into the hands of a focused, interested learner. This, in turn, increases the chance that research‐based information will be applied, and will make a difference in real peoples’ lives. About MyMinnesotaWoods Http://www.MyMinnesotaWoods.umn.edu (MyMinnesotaWoods) is a website developed and maintained by the University of Minnesota Extension Forestry team, which is part of Extension’s Center for Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences. The site’s purpose is to make research‐based information on the care and management of Minnesota’s trees and woodlands accessible to the owners and managers of those resources. The site is a hub, or an index, to the many offerings of our Extension forestry team. Among other things, MyMinnesotaWoods is a sandbox in which to try new approaches to online outreach. The site is designed to add value to our many other content offerings: workshops, publications, community building processes, and more. Flickr photos What: Flickr is a free third‐party photo sharing service. How it works: We upload photos to Flickr. Search engine users @ind them and, by reading descriptions, learn to interpret them. Why: We take a lot of photos. Flickr allows the public to see, and learn from, what we see. Evaluation: However, Sagor’s Minnesota forestry photos have been viewed about 200,000 times. Uploading the photos to Flickr and adding tags required little extra work (photos need to be organized anyway). Allowing the public to see them makes them far more discoverable. One possible goal would be to increase the referral rate from Flickr to our site. Social media tools What: A suite of communication tools including Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. How it works: When we publish new content, it’s automatically shared via Twitter. We manually share content via Facebook. Why: Automation means that after the initial setup, this takes very little time or effort. The bene@it is that it makes content visible through more networks and channels. Evaluation: These channels account for only a few percent of referrals to MyMinnesotaWoods. Because so few of our target audience use social media to obtain forestry information, it’s become a low priority for us. Monthly email update What: An HTML‐formatted email sent to subscribers monthly. How it works: We pay about $250/yr to Constant Contact. Constant Contact manages our 1600‐recipient email database and provides a relatively simple interface in which to enter content. Why: Email remains a preferred mode of communication for many members of our target audience. Sending the email reminds interested readers that our site is there, delivering content rather than making them come to us. Evaluation: Each update is opened about 1300 times by 1000 or so different people. In the week following distribution of the monthly email update, 35‐50% of site visits are referrals from the email. On the day the email is sent, the percentage is much higher (Figure 1). In addition, Constant Contact analytics tell us what content our email recipients actually read. We can use this data to plan future content online as well as in other delivery formats. This provides invaluable, near‐continuous content‐ related feedback from our subscribers. Discussion board What: An open forum to post questions and share experiences. How it works: After a simple registration process, users can post text, photos, and links to the discussion board. Why: Replying to a question on the discussion board takes about as long as replying to a question by email. But an email is read by one person, while content on the discussion board is viewed by hundreds or thousands. While we can always choose to reply privately to questions, the discussion board gives us a popular platform to exchange information with interested members of our audience in a public setting. Discussions add value to the site by helping users apply the content to their situations. The registration process builds connections with motivated users. Evaluation: The discussion board is the third most popular page on MyMinnesotaWoods, surpassed only by the home page and our property tax content. Slideshare What: A free platform to share slideshows with or without audio. How it works: We upload content to Slideshare, then embed it on our site. Why: Slideshare has two important bene@its over Adobe Presenter: Detailed analytics and the ability to embed content rather than taking users away from the site to view it. Evaluation: Top Slideshare content is viewed over 1,000 times per year. A high percentage of those views happen on Slideshare.com, suggesting that users are discovering the content independent of MyMinnesotaWoods. On several occasions, Slideshare content has been requested by high school and university instructors for use in their classes. Events calendar What: A Google calendar that’s public and easily embedded on any website. How it works: We add events and allow select partners to add and manage theirs. The calendar can be embedded on any site, adding visibility to our (and their) events. Why: Google calendar is a simple system, making it easy to manage permissions and content sharing. Evaluation: The calendar is one of the most popular features on the site. We know events account for about 15% of clicks in our monthly email updates. However, we’re unable to track calendar views, links followed, or most other metrics. News headlines What: A listing of relevant news articles from a variety of media sources. How: We @ind news items using various aggregators. We then use Delicious.com to “tag” selected items with a unique code. Tagged items then automatically appear on our site. They are also automatically published via our Twitter stream. Why: Though we focus on Extension content, this feature allows us to easily “curate” content from other sources. Our vision is for MyMinnesotaWoods to be the primary source for Minnesota forestry information. Adding news from a variety of sources helps position us to do that. Evaluation: Over two years beginning in Spring 2007, news links accounted for fully 20% of the clicks in our monthly email updates. Our readers like news. Fig. 1: MyMinnesotaWoods daily pageview data, March‐July 2010. Monthly spikes correspond with email update send dates. RSS feeds What: Subscribers are noti@ied every time new content is published. How it works: We use Feedburner, which allows subscription via email or RSS reader. Feeds also allow partners to publish our headlines on their sites. Why: Feeds allow subscribers to choose their preferred format rather than forcing them to conform to ours. Evaluation: Feeds currently account for a small volume of traf@ic: about 1% over the past year. We see feeds as a tool with great growth potential. Oak wilt status widget What: A graphic “widget” showing the current risk status for oak wilt, a serious disease of Minnesota oaks. The widget can be added to any website. When we update the risk status, the widget instantly updates, wherever it’s deployed. How it works: We provide HTML code to call a linked image on our server. The code is installed on partners’ sites. Clicking the image (“widget”) takes the user to the detailed oak wilt status page on MyMinnesotaWoods. Why: The widget helps our partners make research‐based risk status data available. It also draws new users to Extension content. Evaluation: The widget accounts for 61% of all views of the oak wilt status page. Of these viewers, 45% go on to view other content, suggesting that the widget promotes content site‐wide. Online content, discoverability, and behavior Transformative learning requires many things. Information of the type found on MyMinnesotaWoods and its derivative channels (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds) is but one. While social psychologists would point out that information alone is unlikely to foster behavior change, the site can nonetheless play a key role in landowner learning. The site may promote positive land stewardship outcomes in two important ways: 1) By making information more easily discovered, when it’s needed, by those already motivated to take action. 2) By raising awareness of Extension as a valuable, credible resource for times when land stewardship decisions need to be made. By delivering content to interested users on a regular basis, we’re able to remind people that we exist, increasing the likelihood that when they need information or assistance, they will come back to Extension. 3) By promoting Extension forestry offerings like face‐to‐face workshops that offer opportunities for high‐touch learning, relationship building, and deeper learning to occur. Costs All of the tools described here are free with the exception of Constant Contact. We pay $252/yr for a Constant Contact subscription with up to 2500 subscribers. The far greater cost is the time required to maintain these tools and the content behind them. We estimate that site and content management take 15‐25% of one Extension educator’s time. An undergraduate student puts in an additional 5 hours per week, primarily organizing and formatting content in preparation for publication. Initial development of the MyMinnesotaWoods site cost about $8,000. Summary The recent proliferation of digital communication tools has given Extension professionals a much larger toolkit. Many of these low‐cost tools have potential to make Extension content more accessible to target audiences. This, in turn, increases the chance that research‐ based information will be applied, and will make a difference. MyMinnesotaWoods is, in many ways, a sandbox in which innovative communication tools are tested. Returns on the time invested have been variable, but generally positive. Differences in target audience, educational objectives, program structures, and technical pro@iciency will affect the value of any communication tool to a given Extension team. For more informa7on Eli Sagor 3 , [email protected] or (612) 624‐6948 University of Minnesota Extension, St Paul Philip Potyondy, [email protected] University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources, St Paul MyMinnesotaWoods: http://www.MyMinnesotaWoods.umn.edu . Links to all tools described in this poster are available from the site. Download this poster: http://z.umn.edu/MMWposter 3 Corresponding author
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