Some characteristics of the people Extension serves across Oregon—our consituents or clients—are changing. Broadly speaking, digital literacy, for one, is a big driver of some of the changes we see in people’s behavior. Perhaps we see some web traffic head to Google search that we’d like to see arrive to the Extension web site.

Naturally, our goal is to retain and enhance people’s awareness of the unique expertise and perspective brought to their questions and challenges by OSU Extension Service.

The prevailing thinking on this topic, across many areas of a client’s day-to-day activities—from banking to purchasing an item to seeking out a workshop from a local Extension office—is the degree to which it helps to receive communication messages that appear personalized to the individual. The sensation of “wow, this is just for me!” Whether it’s a postcard in the mailbox or an email message in the IN box, in those cases where it’s the right information coming to them at just the right time, we can expect that message to be well received. We would expect it to be perceived as relevant and worth their immediate attention.

Pause for a moment to think how many emails land in your own IN box and go unread? In cases where we can increase the relevancy of that subject line and the information inside the message, we can seek to change the nature of that problem.

Opportunities abound to personalize!

So, the challenge we set before us is to discover ways to begin delivering timely information in a personalized way. To achieve this goal, you devote some time to creating a strategy fitting the unique aspects of your corner of the Extension landscape. In collaboration with O&E’s digital engagement team, you’re then outfitted with the appropriate mix of CRM tools to meet your needs.

From there, the next steps are powered by your own creativity! It may help to see an example? I recently brainstormed one simple workflow that I thought would make a big impact. Let’s walk through it.

A simple example

We can imagine a face-to-face class that takes place and some hot topic emerges, organically, from the discussion. One idea we can have as the instructor/facilitator is to follow up to send relevant, topic-related resources to that cohort. The steps would look like:

• Login to the CRM immediately after end of class
  for timeliness
• Create a custom email message; fill it with relevant links
  use an email layout template for expediency
• The new email delivers out to the cohort
  only the people from that specific class
• The cohort is able to continue the discussion
  perhaps by linking to a discussion board where they can share ideas quickly online

And it doesn’t stop there…

There happen to be so many ways to implement personalization that they don’t all fit in a single blog post. I would even like to begin exploring “proactive customer service,” which is a strategy by which we answer people’s questions for them even before they ask them and that just seems like it will be an exciting option. Look for it in a future post!

What ideas can you dream up? I would welcome your vision of a personalized experience for your constituents, clients, and partners! Send me your ideas?

We can’t personalize what we can’t track

In the example above, we see a chance to really effectively communicate with a distinct audience. But there happens to be prep work needing to be done to achieve that success. Let’s discuss some of the ways a CRM platform will help us get there.

• create the list of names and email addresses for program participants—our Contacts
• track registration for upcoming classes
• the ability to track attendees for each class—the cohort
• use a simple filter to end up with a list of Contacts making up that specific cohort
• quickly pull from a set of beautifully designed email templates
• rely on the CRM to provide email delivery directly to each person
• then… sit back and wait to hear from satisfied clients!

About the O&E digital engagement team. In the coming months, many of you will hear from me (Mark Kindred) as I begin a phase of needs assessments, as a step toward producing a long-term CRM strategy. I look forward to talking with you and ensuring my work is in alignment with the business needs of your unit and the long-term vision of the university. The digital engagement team is looking forward to talking with you about how digital engagement is aligned with your work and can provide new benefits.

Meanwhile… Extension Website updates.

• If you missed the May 31st webinar training, you can now watch the recording. You will learn about Managing County Landing Pages and Local Focus Areas. County pages have a new description section. You are able to move information about your county farther down the page, if needed.
• We have switched the map technology used on the site. You’ll notice some difference in how it looks, but the intent was to make it function in all the same ways. One improvement worth noting: the process for entering an event location is simpler. You can type in the address—no longer need to find it on the map. Also improved: the map on the Find us page is wider.
• Our History page in the About menu is recently published. Check out the historical photos of Extension, which also serve as a great example of how programs and local programs, such as 4-H and Master Gardeners, can add and display images on their pages.

Google Insights analyzes search phrases people use when searching the Internet, and found one trend they call the Age of Assistance. This fits well with what we do at Extension. Audiences come to the Extension website to find helpful resources, and in today’s online world they skim the content to quickly see if it meets their needs.

Google Insights discovered people are increasingly researching everything to either know what to expect or to make decisions.

People ask for:

• Specific ideas (e.g. recipe ideas)
• Things to avoid (e.g. pesticides to avoid),
• What is best for me in my situation (e.g. best with my soil type).

They expect to find these answers online. Did you write your content in a way to come up in these type of searches?

Writing for the Web vs. for Print

Once on our website, will they decide to stay? When an article looks difficult to read, it sends a message that the topic will be difficult to do. By applying some simple changes to your content, you can make it more readable, and it will also encourage visitors to dig in and use it.

Some examples include:

• Lead with the most important point
• Break content into short, readable chunks

Many have done this already with content online; see a comparison table for even more user-tested guidelines when Writing for the Web.

Highlighted Points

You may have seen pull quotes in magazine articles, where an important or interesting sentence is enlarged and stylized. You can now do this for articles on the Extension website to catch the attention of browsing visitors. Just copy the sentence you want, paste on a separate line, highlight it, and click the “insert pull quote” icon in the tool bar.

Social Media or E-News Blurbs

If you took the time to write and post an article, then take a second to think how you can promote it so people want to click and read more.

The Teaser section of the editing screen includes a description field that shows up in search results and can be used for e-newsletters. On articles and videos, there’s also a new place to craft a Facebook post or short tweet, which will come in handy in the longer-term digital strategy.

Getting Started

For new content added to the website or when you’re reviewing existing content, keep the above suggestions in mind. However, for the several hundred articles already published on the Extension website, the EESC publications team will copyedit articles using the EESC style guide and apply these practices along the way. The content stays published while EESC and the Content Team leader work on revising and approving it. It will not affect the publishing process nor visibility of the content to the public. Here’s the process for content team leaders and links to learn more:

Read the full details of this EESC Copyediting process in the Extension Website User Guide under Managing Content.

List of changes to the web guide

When we have updates to the website, we will let you know at the end of all our future blog posts. Here’s one not already mentioned above:

There are new tagging fields on educational content to be used for internal reporting and sorting as part of the future digital strategy.

• Season – is there a specific time of year this article or video is about?
• Marketing Category – is there a specific theme this content fits?
• Audience – is this content meant for a commercial or home audience?
• Language – is this content in a language other than English (this was an existing field)?
• Diversity and Inclusion checkbox – is this article or video specifically representing or addressing equity or social justice issues?

On the Extension website, we share practical educational resources that puts science into the hands of people across Oregon and beyond to help meet their local challenges.*

One of the essential commitments of this website change underway is to facilitate collaborative development of a customer-focused digital strategy based on content. Educational content on the website is driven by and managed by program area leaders (via faculty on content teams), and the content strategy is based on audience needs.

Priority is given to developing relevant, sharable content in OSU Extension’s new content management system. This content can then be shared many places, including the website.

Facilitate content strategy workshops

As faculty experts gather this summer to share projects of interest with each other, consider adding a content planning workshop to your agenda. What would this look like and what tools can you find to help facilitate this?

Extension’s content strategist** can work with content teams to facilitate interactive and reflective workshops, or develop templates for content team leaders to guide your own working groups. To plan, begin with three basic questions:

1. Why are you doing this workshop?
2. What do you need to get out of this?
3. How will you get that?

The content strategy toolbox includes ideas such as:

• Ways to define the top priority content you want to develop
• Mapping your existing content to align it with audience questions
• Creation of an audience journey map through the seasons
• Development of a roles matrix and workflows to improve processes
• Card sorting for tackling consistency in content keywords

If you would like a facilitated workshop, so the content team leader can fully participate in the activities, reach out early to collaborate on what would work best in the time and setting available.

Also, starting this summer the web and content strategy team will be looking more closely at your audiences’ experiences with the online content, both through direct user research and by digging into the analytics. Questions that have come up through discussions with content team leaders will be explored, and we may ask you to connect us to people you serve, while we reach out to those new to Extension. We want to learn what the public is looking for, and how that matches to what we provide.

Interested in a content planning workshop or want to explore more your audiences’ experiences? Contact the web and content strategy team to get started.

*This happens thanks to the faculty who work with Extension and Experiment Station Communications (EESC) to produce multimedia and catalog publications, and the also the new development of 38 content teams that create articles and share educational documents directly on the website. These include: Family and Community Health, Sea Grant, Forestry and Natural Resources, 34 Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources working groups, and a collaboration of three program areas focused on Youth Development.

**Michele Scheib

In a nutshell, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Manager, and what this means is it’s a type of software to organize, build, and maintain strong relationships.

At OSU Extension, it’s true we refer to the people in the communities we serve as something other than “customers,” so we will find another way to describe that part.

Yet we do know the nature of Extension getting work done across Oregon continues to be reliant on relationships. Thus, the ability to efficiently manage the ties by which we relate with individual communities becomes more and more critical.

The CRM development for Extension will be driven by the goal of strengthening relationships.

So, a big motivator to use a CRM software platform is to allow our organization to act more efficiently with, about, or on behalf of a contact—i.e. a relationship with a constituent or program partner—and in the long term, increase the overall value of that relationship over its lifespan.

Have you ever found yourself wondering “How often did I connect with this person on my region’s programs?” If so, as you begin to open up the CRM and review its reporting tools, you will find that answer!

Adding a set of technology tools that organize and analyze information about activities in your region allows OSU Extension Service to perform work efficiently, having an impact on more people over time without overtaxing existing resources. The eventual aim is to provide improved services to Oregonians by engaging in data-driven decision making, relying on information that shows us what has been relevant and successful in the past.

How does Salesforce fit into this conversation?

As far as CRMs go, they happen to have many shapes and sizes. The cloud-based software company, Salesforce, is at the top of this category. In recent years, OSU has made significant investments in Salesforce CRM infrastructure and this investment is growing.

The reasons to have selected Salesforce include the fact it offers many valuable and flexible features. And I am personally excited to begin exploring the benefits it can provide to your own operations.

As Extension’s impact grows, so does the need to manage relationships

As we apply a thoughtful process — informed by conversations I have with each of you — to the roll-out of CRM features to help you work, the benefits include:

• 360-degree view of constituents and partners
  Awareness of all the points at which you interact with constituents can help you find and focus on individuals and what they truly need.
• Enrich the relationships, person by person
  Insights drawn out by a CRM report will pinpoint potential program enhancements to deliver benefits to specific people or communities. That sense of individualized attention, known to be time consuming using current tools, can become a powerful communication method inside the CRM-driven outreach efforts.
• Enhancing communication
  As you know from experience, learning all we can about people and their distinct needs matters. It makes it easier to add  relevancy to the information they receive from Extension. As new people come your way with perhaps more complex questions, a trove of details inside the CRM means you quickly see more about them in one place, making your response and advice more informed.
• And many many more!

My name is Mark Kindred, and I am in the newly-established role of Salesforce Developer for OSU Extension Service and the division of Outreach & Engagement. In the coming months, many of you will hear from me as I begin a “needs assessment” phase of a longer-term CRM platform strategy. I look forward to talking with you and ensuring my work is in alignment with the business needs of your unit and the long-term strategy of the university.

The digital engagement strategy team looks forward to talking with you about how CRM is aligned with your work and can provide new benefits to you.

Use topic pages and tags so visitors find educational content

When visitors come to the Extension website, they want to see what information we have to answer the question on their mind or to discover what’s new. Topic menu pages (which include the landing page and the “Browse all Resources” pages for each topic) are a primary way for them to browse educational content.

• Topic landing pages: 122,450 pageviews, 78% of visitors clicked on a link
• Topic “browse all resources” pages: 15,038 pageviews (since rollout in October), 86% of visitors clicked on a link

The data shows that content is much more likely to be seen if it is tagged with a topic. On average, a piece of content on the site has received 57  views/downloads/clicks since November 2018. However, pieces of content tagged with at least one topic have received an average of 69 during the same time.

This effect is even greater if the content is featured on a topic landing page. Pageviews/downloads/clicks of content increases threefold (average of 319%) while the content is featured on a topic landing page compared to the period before it was featured.

What you can do to make sure visitors see your educational content:

• Make sure to tag educational content with a topic. For most content types, the field where you can select the topic is in the second collapsed section on the edit screen.
• If you tag content with a topic, be sure to also tag it with useful keywords so it is easier to find on the topic’s “Browse all resources” page. See the Tagging Guidelines in the Extension website guide.
• Work with the topic’s committee to feature content that is especially important to audiences or seasonally relevant. Learn more about topic committees.
  

A complete, searchable guide to the Extension Website is now available online: beav.es/extension-webguide

This guide contains all information and instructions you need to work with the Extension website as well as tips and tricks for advanced users. For those of you who are already familiar with the site or just need a quick refresher, it includes several quick start reference documents.

We welcome questions and feedback and hope that this will serve as a valuable resource to Extension employees who work on the website.