Brooke Edmunds – Extension Foundation

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.

Infographic #1 Infographic of survey results

I’ve also been able to quickly make memes to promote events and resources on our county Extension Twitter and Facebook pages:

Screenshot of OSU Extension Lane County Twitter account

If you want an overview of Canva, check out this eXtension Learn session “Canva in 30 Minutes”.

The Seed to Supper program is a partnership between Oregon State University Extension and the Oregon Food Bank. The program increases food security of low-income residents by providing education and support, empowering participants to grow their own vegetables.

The program consists of six two-hour sessions for adults and covers the basics of vegetable gardening. Topics include planning a garden, managing soil, growing season maintenance and harvesting. The program is provided at no cost and relies on support from the Oregon Food Bank, OSU Extension, volunteers and private donations. OSU Extension in Linn and Benton counties is seeing great results in our communities from this program. We’re reaching traditionally underserved audiences and it’s also been a useful recruiting tool for our Master Gardener volunteer program.

I was so lucky to have a chance to superpower this program and develop my communication skills through the i-Three Issues Corps experience. The major goal I set for my project was to develop skills to report the impacts of the Seed to Supper program in an engaging way to the general public. My initial thoughts were to develop a suite of promotional materials (infographics, videos, etc.) to use on social media.

Along with meeting amazing Extension professionals at the i-Three Issues Corps conference, I was introduced to ESRI’s Story Map application. What a stunning way to present Extension’s impact! I switched gears a little to make creating a Story Map the cornerstone of my i-Three Issues Corps project. Click the screenshot below a view my work in progress (comments & suggestions are welcome!):

Click to view the Seed to Supper Story map — Screenshot from the ESRI Story Map for OSU Extension’s Seed to Supper Program (click to view)

ESRI offers quite a few different layouts and I’m using the Story Map Journal design. It’s described as a sequential, place-based narrative story map and was a good fit for this particular story. Story Maps is a very flexible tool and I’m excited to use it to showcase our regional Master Gardener projects in the future!

Up next is completing the suite of impact reporting tools by developing a few infographics!
Have any suggestions for programs to create eye-catching infographics? Want to share some examples? Please comment or share a link below!