Expanding the Proactive Audience

One time-consuming demand confronting Extension professionals is dealing with the one-on-one contacts made by phone, letter, or personal visit. While all of the requests for information presents an opportunity for teaching, they require a lot of time for the interaction as well as researching appropriate alternatives. This time detracts from the focus on planned programming. Because of the diversity of questions raised, the agent usually finds it difficult to document measurable or observable impacts for this work frequently characterized as reactive.

One way to respond to consumer calls and other "reactive" work is to hire another professional to spread the contacts to more people or using trained, supervised volunteers to handle this workload. Telephone information banks with pre-recorded responses and fact sheets or publications addressing frequently asked questions are other ways of helping to cope with the time- intensive, one-on-one contact. An ironic outcome of whatever means are employed to gain efficiencies in handling these contacts is that this effort generates more contacts, so it's difficult to get in front of the problem.

Extension's ability to respond to questions has helped build organization loyalty. So it's not in the interest of our organization to become so issue or major program oriented that we can't be responsive to individuals. I'd like to present a strategy for involving these individual clients in a planned, major program effort.

An early step in implementing such a strategy is to work with an advisory committee to identify important community issues related to the educational program. Examples may be household solid waste handling and recycling, household and landscape water conservation, safe use of pest control materials and integrated pest management strategies, or family diet. The issue may be interdisciplinary and become an office priority program. Once identified, the task is to develop a multifaceted program that will help address the issue. This issues-based program becomes a theme or trademark for the year that this community problem is highlighted.

Extension educators now must find innovative ways to get this information to those who contact them and to the community at large. Bookmarks, mail inserts, or fact sheets may be enclosed with responses to other questions clients have raised or distributed at public buildings and to those who visit the Extension office. A yearlong media campaign involving radio, newspaper, cable television, and the Extension newsletter may be another strategy. A series of single concept telephone add-on messages to give after questions have been answered also involves the client in the proactive programs. The message may be simple: "An important reminder that we're passing along to our callers this week is that the label on the pesticide container provides the legal framework for the approved uses of the material; therefore, it's important to read the label before each use." The same local issue becomes the theme for talks given to community organizations, the Extension display at the fair, an educational event at a shopping mall, or even a tabletop exhibit to be used at a plant problem diagnostic clinic or an Extension Homemaker meeting.

Added together, these approaches, along with others that fit your issue and your community, provide increased educational time for this program initiative. This effort doesn't solve the time demands of individual requests for information; it does, however, provide a way of aggregating all of these contacts and turning a reactive situation into a proactive opportunity.