Uncategorized – Page 2 – Extension Foundation

Now Available: The National Registry of Cooperative Extension Programs and Assets

This tool is now available to Cooperative Extension. Join 50+ other Extension programs that have already registered!

Responding to specific requests in regional meetings and through various projects including EXCITE, the Extension Foundation has developed a National Registry of Cooperative Extension Programs and Assets (NRCEPA). This tool will enable Cooperative Extension professionals to register their projects, programs, or curriculum for nationwide collaboration among Cooperative Extension colleagues.

The intent of this tool is to assist Extension professionals to quickly find other like-programming efforts across the system to reduce duplication of work, and help speed up access to digital assets that would be useful to the development of new programs.
At the request of Extension leaders, the NRCEPA provides ready-access to a living database of efforts across the system in order to rapidly respond to system-wide funding opportunities.

The NRCEPA was co-designed with a number of individuals and organizations across Cooperative Extension including the ECOP Health Innovation Task Force, and the National Urban Extension Leaders (NUEL).

Check it out at extension.org/registry

The National Urban Extension Leaders (NUEL) has been talking about the need to have a national database that allows for the collection of current Extension program efforts in urban and metropolitan spaces to better allow Extension to tell it’s ‘Urban Impacts’ story. The National Registry is what we had been hoping for…and so much more!

– Marie Ruemenapp, Extension Specialist & Co-Director Urban Collaborators, Michigan State University Extension

Features

When registering a project, program, or curriculum, users are invited to add any digital assets they feel may be helpful to their peers nationally for download. This includes evaluation tools, images, videos, text for campaigns, and more.
Auto-segments Cooperative Extension programs by program area including Ag & Natural Resources, 4-H/Youth Development, FACS, Community Development, Immunization Education, and Urban Extension.
After submitting your program, project, or curriculum to the registry, you’ll be able to return anytime to make updates.
Dynamic search helps users find what they need quickly by keyword.

The Extension Collaborative on Immunization Teaching and Engagement (EXCITE) piloted the NRCEPA as a means of taking a landscape assessment of immunization education programs across Cooperative Extension. This enabled EXCITE to see the scope of efforts already happening across Cooperative Extension on capacity funds, identify potential collaborations, share curriculums and materials, and lift up the work happening in this area to our CDC and USDA-NIFA partners.

– Michelle Rodgers, Associate Dean and Director, University of Delaware, EXCITE Project Director

Follow the National Registry on Twitter at @NRCEPA for real-time updates with new program, project, and curriculum submissions.

This work is supported in part by New Technologies for Ag Extension grant no. 2020-41595-30123 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

June 24, 2021/by Aaron Weibe

CRM for Extension – Evaluating the Basics

News, Newsroom, Uncategorized

Stephen Judd is serving as the eXtension Foundation Customer Relationship Management Fellow. This post is an update on progress on this funded Fellowship from the USDA-NIFA New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement.

Virtually all customer relationship management systems (CRM) will have some common core functionality. These features are prerequisites for a CRM to be useful, but the implementations can be different. As an early step in your evaluation, assessing how this core functionality works, how configurable it is, and how it fits with your use cases is important.

Common functionality

Contacts – the people you are keeping track of
Accounts – a grouping of contacts, could be a business/company, farm, organization, household, etc.
Lists / Campaigns – a set of accounts or contacts that share common attributes or interests
Reports – customizable views of the data stored in the CRM
Users – the staff who will be interacting with the CRM

People example

A CRM needs to be able to store information about people (contacts.) Typically, a contact will be a single record that has values for various attributes or fields (e.g., first name, last name, email, phone, address.) You should ensure that the provided fields will enable your use cases, or that custom fields can be easily added, given your organizational resources.

Some attributes may require multiple values, like email. The contact record may have multiple fields – email1, email2, email3 – or it may have a separate record for each email address and allow you to relate them to the contact. Depending on what you know about the contacts you will be storing and how you plan to use the addresses, one method may be better than the other.

Considerations / Questions

Object and fields – Does the CRM you are evaluating have the types of objects (contacts, accounts, etc.) you will need, based on your use cases? If not, is there a way to create custom objects or fields, given your organizational resources?
Licensing / Pricing – What is the per user cost of the CRM? Is there a limit on contacts that can be stored? Is cost based on the number of contacts?
Permissions / Privacy – What information can different users view and edit? Do you need to restrict access for certain users? Can attributes/fields have view/edit restrictions or is it at the object (e.g., contact) level?
Types of records – Can there be different types of records and how does that work? You may want certain attributes only for certain types of records, for example, for volunteers you may want the year they started volunteering, but not want that field on other types of contacts.
Lists / campaigns – How does the CRM handle creating lists of contacts? Can you send email to these lists directly from the CRM or do you need to export to another system? Is there a cost associated with sending emails?
Interactions – How can you track the interactions with contacts in the CRM? Are these visible to everyone, just the user recording them, or customizable?
Reports – How difficult is it to create reports and run them? Can the report information be exported for use in other programs or visualizations? How is access to reports controlled?
Duplication – How does the CRM determine that records are duplicates of each other? Is there an easy way to merge them?
Integration – Can the CRM be integrated with other systems you are currently using (e.g., event registration, mass email)?
Bulk data – What is the process to get existing data into the CRM?

Summing up

Given the personas and use cases you’ve compiled, evaluating the basic CRM functionality, as outlined above, will give you a good first pass at the CRM systems you’re evaluating. This will help you determine which ones should be evaluated further, and which are not suitable for your needs.

I welcome feedback and questions at stephen.judd@unh.edu

Previous post: CRM for Extension – Use Cases

December 24, 2019/by Aaron Weibe

CRM for Extension – Use cases

Fellowships, Uncategorized

Armed with our goals and personas, it’s time to articulate what our people will actually do with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. At this point, we’re still not evaluating specific CRMs, but identifying its uses, so that we will be able to assess which features and capabilities will be needed for our organization.

To accomplish our task, we will build up a library of use cases that will help us identify how our CRM should behave. These use cases will be based around the business processes where we believe CRM will be useful and will take the perspective of the personas we’ve created.

Description of use cases from usability.gov:

“A use case is a written description of how users will perform tasks on your website. It outlines, from a user’s point of view, a system’s behavior as it responds to a request. Each use case is represented as a sequence of simple steps, beginning with a user’s goal and ending when that goal is fulfilled.”

In our situation, we won’t focus on the individual steps of a process, but rather on the tasks associated with particular use cases. These tasks will help inform us of the CRM features or capabilities that we will want to be evaluating for when looking at specific CRM systems. We can assume that any CRM will be able to store the contact information (name, email, phone, address, etc.) for people. We’ll also be assuming that the people interacting with the CRM have the necessary licenses and/or permissions to accomplish their tasks.

Example use cases:

Use Case 1	Advisory Councils
Actor	Persona – Extension Support Staff – Sam
Each county in our Extension organization has an Advisory Council, comprised of citizens and decision-makers that help guide the activities of Extension in that county. Sam uses the CRM to keep track of current council members, their roles, and term on the council for Sam’s county. Sam is often asked for a list of council members and their roles.
Tasks	Lookup or create contact and contact info Add contact to a list of Advisory Council members Create or edit information related to Advisory Council membership Create or run report of current Advisory Council members with specific information about them and their membership
CRM Implications	Duplicate person (contact) management Way to create lists or groups of people Custom information (fields) for certain types of lists Customizable reports and filters

Use Case 2	Track interactions with people
Actor	Persona – Extension Specialist / Agent / Educator – Reilly
Extension professionals have many interactions with the people we serve each day. Reilly would like to keep track of many of these interactions in the CRM, both to help as Reilly has subsequent interactions with the person and to assist colleagues that may interact with the same person. Ideally, Reilly would like to be able to accomplish this using a mobile phone shortly after the interaction or through an email application, without having to log in to a separate interface. Reilly also needs to be able to generate reports of these interactions.
Tasks	Lookup or create contact and contact info Record interaction with person Create or run report of interactions for specified time periods
CRM Implications	Duplicate person (contact) management Way to create and associate interactions with people (contacts) Visibility of interactions for other users of CRM Integration with email application Mobile interface or app

Use Case 3	Government officials / decision-makers
Actor	Persona – Extension Administrator – Pat
Part of the continued support and funding for Extension programs is based on the support of government officials and decision-makers. Pat would like to use CRM to maintain the contact information for these people and record interactions with them. Pat needs reports that can be shared with others in the organization.
Tasks	Lookup or create contact and contact info Indicate that person is government official or decison-maker Record interaction with person Create or run report of interactions for specified time periods
CRM Implications	Duplicate person (contact) management Way to create lists or groups of people Custom information (fields) for certain types of lists Way to create and associate interactions with people (contacts) Visibility of interactions for other users of CRM Customizable and shareable reports and filters

These three use cases are simplified, but could be made as detailed or complex as you’d like. Their purpose is to describe the way people will interact with the CRM and help identify the specific CRM features and capabilities that we should evaluate.

The use cases should be based on what people will actually need to do with the CRM to conduct business processes that you’ve identified that fit with your organizational goals. Implications for how data may need to be structured and shared will be important when you are doing the actual evaluation of CRM systems.

Based on the use cases above, we can start constructing a list of CRM features for evaluation:

Duplicate management
Contact grouping or lists
Custom attributes for contacts or lists
Tracking interactions
Sharing and visibility between CRM users
Reporting capabilities, including customization, sharing, filtering, saving, etc.

Other use cases you may consider developing include managing mass email, event registrations, and volunteer hour tracking. The sky’s the limit, just keep them aligned with your people and the business processes that fit your organizational goals.

I welcome feedback and questions at stephen.judd@unh.edu

Previous post: CRM for Extension – Personas

November 25, 2019/by Aaron Weibe

Using Artificial Intelligence to Support Extension Services

Uncategorized

By David Warren
eXtension Artificial Intelligence Fellow

Alexa, Siri, Google Search and other consumer-facing machine learning services have revolutionized the way that many people find answers to questions that occur in everyday life. With this thought in mind, eXtension is investigating how AI and machine learning tools could be applied to both improve access to information and increase the local impact of Extension Services.

Our investigation has led to a scoping effort and preparation of a grant application that envisions the creation of a machine learning service. This service would accept questions from clients of partner Extension Services via text input, and deliver answers and resource links.

The type of service we are envisioning is a “chatbot”, which will utilize machine learning algorithms to find the best answers to questions. The chatbot will built on top of eXtension’s large database of thousands of questions and answers gleaned from years of the Ask an Expert service. Additional content hosted by partner Extension Services such as fact sheets, reports, links to workshops, and connections to local offices and resources could also form part of the answers that would be supplied to questioners.

The chatbot would be accessible via API’s by the various Extension Services for use with websites, text response from phones, and potentially other uses. We hope to superpower local extension websites with this service, with eXtension remaining invisible behind the scenes. The goal is to provide local information and local connections, capitalizing on national data for machine learning to provide high-quality chats/answers.

This project in no way conceived as a replacement for the vitally important people who work in Extension Services. Instead, it is intended to leverage the expertise of Extension personnel in a new way, in order to reach people who likely would not have connected to Extension. We will work hard to give it the Extension feel, with right touch and local feeling.

The initial meeting of an ad hoc advisory group was held on April 10, 2019. Attendees from Land Grant Universities included: Becky Griffin of the University of Georgia; Rose Hayden-Smith of the University of California; Steve Judd of the University of New Hampshire; Robin Baumgartner of the University of Idaho; Eli Sagor of the University of Minnesota; and David Warren of Oklahoma State University.

A second meeting of the ad hoc advisory group is planned for April 29, 2019. The grant application for this project will be submitted at the beginning of June, and if funded, the project should begin late in the summer. Look for further updates here at eXtension.org.

April 23, 2019/by Aaron Weibe

February 2019 News Roundup

News, Newsroom, Uncategorized

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UrtXTCh_lE[/embedyt]

eXtension’s Impact Collaborative can bring its Innovation Skill-Building Experience to your state or institution. We work with our members on designing an event contextualized for their needs and focused on their goals. Learn more about our State and Institutional Events here.

Upcoming Member Events

Impact Collaborative Summit, April 2019:

We are pleased to announce that the registration for our first of two national Impact Collaborative Summits is now open. The Spring Impact Collaborative Summit is from April 30th – May 2nd, 2019 in Atlanta, GA. Registration is available here. Each of our member Directors & Administrators have been provided a promo code to receive 5 free registrations to the Summit to send a project or program team. A registration fee will apply for additional teams.

The Impact Collaborative Summit brings unique opportunities to create impactful results at the local level by increasing Cooperative Extension’s organizational readiness and capacity for innovation and change. We help connect project and program teams with skills, tools, resources and partners that can expand and deepen their impact in a continuing partnership with the Impact Collaborative. You can hear what some of our participants had to say about our October 2018 Impact Collaborative Summit here.

The registration deadline is April 7th and space is limited; we encourage you to have your team register as soon as possible.

More information about the Impact Collaborative Summit, registration, and hotel booking can be found here.

Engaged Program Development Approaches for Cooperative Extension Webinar

When?

March 20th, 2019 at 2 PM EDT

Who can attend?

This webinar is part of eXtension’s Engage & Empower Online and is available to eXtension Members through the Impact Collaborative.

Description

We talk about engagement, but what does it mean when we think about how we conduct our work in Extension? How should we approach program planning in an engaged manner? Who should we include in our work? And how does our work change? During this interactive session we will explore answers to these questions based on ongoing research and experiences in this area.

Presenter

Karen Vines
Assistant Professor
Continuing Professional Education Specialist
Virginia Cooperative Extension

Registration Information

Registration information will be sent to eXtension members.

News from eXtension

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyVE1zV0Cik[/embedyt]

18 More Cooperative Extension professionals to join the Impact Collaborative as Innovation Facilitators to advance program impact

In January, 2019, 41 Cooperative Extension professionals representing 28 institutions attended eXtension’s Impact Collaborative Innovation Facilitator Training in Atlanta, GA, and completed initial learning and application of the Impact Collaborative methodology.

To accommodate our members that were unable to attend the January training session, we are hosting a second Innovation Facilitator training in March. 18 new Innovation Facilitators will join us at the session, representing 11 institutions that were not represented in January. The skills learned at this training help these Innovation Facilitators lead innovation skill-building experiences at state or institutional events and at the national Impact Collaborative Summits.

View Results from the January Training

eXtension Launches Redesigned Website

eXtension has launched a redesigned version of its website. The new design provides greater clarity to the mission of eXtension, its flagship program – the Impact Collaborative, and other national and supporting resources.

With user experience as a primary goal, the new design allows for users to quickly access information and see the most up-to-date content on how eXtension is helping Extension professionals’ effectiveness in addressing issues of importance to the nation.

Visit Us Online

Engage & Empower Online

eXtension has created a new online platform for members designed to collectively drive innovation and action toward meaningful impacts. Engage & Empower Online allows the Impact Collaborative to connect with its Innovation Facilitators, Key Informants, partners, and project/program teams across the nation to help drive collective impact.Engage & Empower Online is hosted on the LumApps platform, a Google-endorsed intranet/extranet solution. Innovation Facilitators and Impact Collaborative project/program teams will be provided access to the platform shortly.

Learn More

Online Innovation Skill-Building Experience

eXtension has developed an online version of the Impact Collaborative Innovation Skill-Building Experience. This new on-demand resource will enable fast delivery of the Impact Collaborative Innovation Skill-Building process to support teams and help track their progress.

This resource also provides our Innovation Facilitators with a tool to guide project and program teams back in their states and institutions, to ultimately help with program impact.

EventMobi Extends Discount to eXtension Members

To assist our members with their own events, we have partnered with EventMobi, an Event Registration and experience application, to offer an exclusive discount for eXtension Members.EventMobi provides an award-winning event app, which allows you to distribute your event content, engage and communicate with your audience, and transition away from paper reliance at your meetings & events.

As per the EventMobi 2019 price list here, eXtension Foundation member organizations will qualify for 15% off any of the following packages and enhancements until March 1/2020.

● Pro 500, Pro Unlimited, Max Package
● Sponsor & Exhibitor Promotion
● Live Polling & in-app Q&A

To take advantage of this offer, please send an email to sales@eventmobi.com and mention “EventMobi – eXtension Foundation Member Discount” to their team.

Customer Relationship Management Webinar

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrU8HxN1IEE[/embedyt]

Our eXtension funded fellow, Stephen Judd, hosted a webinar on Customer Relationship Management. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are a tool widely used by companies to track their interactions with customers and partners. CRM is also being used by Extension systems to keep track of their interactions with people, though the preferred term for the “C” in CRM may be clientele or contact.

The webinar provided an overview of what CRM is, what features are most relevant to Extension, and how using it can help Extension systems maintain their clientele relationships. If you didn’t get a chance to view the webinar, you can access it through the link below.

Upcoming Webinars

Check out all upcoming professional development events listed on learn.extension.org

The Impact of the Opioid Crisis on Hospitals March 12th, 2019 at 3:00 PM EDT. Learn More or Register
Getting Started With Quality Hay & Pasture, March 13th, 2019 at 7:00 PM EDT. Learn More or Register
Producing & Using Black Soldier Fly Larva in Small Poultry Flocks March 22th, 2019 at 3 PM EDT. Learn More or Register

March 7, 2019/by Aaron Weibe