Participating in the i-Three Issues Corps has been an amazing professional development experience. It was an opportunity to build new relationships with Extension colleagues across the country and learn new tech skills.
In my last post, I shared how ESRI’s Story Maps program can communicate Extension’s impact to online audiences. The backbone of a Story Map is strong visuals: a colorful map, videos, photographs or other type of graphics. (If you want to learn more about getting started with Story Maps check out this webinar.)
For my i-Three Issues Corps project, I used Story Maps as a tool to share the impact of the Seed to Supper program in my Oregon counties. I wanted to visually display how teaching basic food gardening to low-income adults can increase their food security. I collected participant survey data and decided to use infographics to communicate the results.
There are several options to create graphs and infographics. If you have the skill and the software, then Photoshop is great. But there are also free online options including Piktochart and Canva among many others. I decided to use Canva because of it’s flexibility. (Note: Neither I nor eXtension have an affiliation with Canva.)
Canva is free and has diverse options. It can create infographics, social media posts & headers, posters, Powerpoint slides, flyers, and custom dimension pieces. I found that it is very intuitive to use. I was able to quickly develop several small infographics to incorporate into my Story Maps project. These infographics will be wrapped into social media promotional pieces, too.
I’ve also been able to quickly make memes to promote events and resources on our county Extension Twitter and Facebook pages:
If you want an overview of Canva, check out this eXtension Learn session “Canva in 30 Minutes”.