Yesterday’s Back the Future: Using Mass Media for Extension Communications webinar had over 300 participants who engaged with the Mass Media Pollinators New Technologies in Agricultural Education (NTAE) grant project team who shared what they have learned so far creating a mass media campaign to encourage the creation of more pollinator habitats. 

Kara Maddox, National Pesticide Safety Education Center (NPSEC) Creative Director, Communications and NTAE eXtension Fellow, was joined by her teammates Tom Smith, NPSEC Executive Director, and Courtney Weatherbee, NPSEC Executive Assistant, to share the project background and big picture overview, the organizational and creative challenges experienced so far with this project. This included the challenge of bridging the gap between academia and corporate cultures as well as technology challenges, especially tool use. The benefits of converting long-form written publications with short-form radio “spots” that link through a website landing page for more information was shared.

A lively discussion via the chat included participant examples of academic/corporate partnerships, personal data collection, and privacy concerns as well as recommendations to work with institutional communications/marketing and/or legal departments as needed. 

Many feedback comments shared this as the biggest takeaway from this webinar, “The importance of boiling down the large content to small bite-sized shareable content. Also learning about the different speeds was very helpful for perspective when working on projects.”

Opportunities for additional content, conversation, and sharing are available in the Mass Media for Extension Messaging group in Connect.Extension.org, open to all Cooperative Extension professionals nationwide.