Communicating Ag Science Notes

Communicating Ag Science

Five Key Dimensions of Communication

1. Message: What needs to be communicated?

2. Context of the Audience: What aspects of the audience's context need consideration?

3. Mode of Communication: What communication mode is appropriate for the message and context?

4. Context of the Communicator: What aspects of the communicator's context need acknowledgment?

5. Feedback & Evaluation: How do we know if communication was effective.

Communication Projects vs. Communication Plans

• A communication plan describes what will be communicated, to whom, and how, assuming the 'what' and 'why' have been thoroughly considered.

• A well-designed communication project articulates the rationale for communicating in the first place.

Core Elements of a Design Approach

A design approach involves a cyclical process:

1. Problem/Opportunity: Identify the problem or opportunity.

   • Why does it matter?

   • What is the root cause?

2. Design: Develop strategies to address the problem.

   • What strategies will be used?

   • Multiple channels may be necessary.

   • Who is the target audience?

   • What instrument will work?

   • What will be achieved?

3. Deliver: Implement the designed strategies.

   • What is required for effective delivery?

   • How will this deliver change?

   • What is the benefit-to-cost ratio?

4. Feedback - Evaluate and Improve: Continuously evaluate and improve the approach based on feedback.

Default Design Approach

• The default design approach mirrors the core elements of the design approach: problem/opportunity, strategies, deliver, and feedback to evaluate and improve.

Design Tools

• A wide range of design tools are available.

Program Logic

• Problem Statement:

  • Identify the underlying issue being addressed, who it affects, and its root causes.

  • The statement should be targeted and specific, not just state the program's need.

• Inputs:

  • List available resources like people, funding, time, knowledge, networks, places, equipment, partner organizations, and community groups.

• Outputs: Activities:

  • Describe and count the activities of the program.

  • Define what will be done upon completion of the program.

• Outputs: Participation:

  • Identify the program's target group and their demographics.

  • Determine who else is involved and their roles.

• Short-Term Outcomes:

  • Describe the expected changes upon program completion.

  • These may include changes in skills, knowledge, attitudes, awareness, or motivation.

  • Consider if there is evidence to suggest that the activities will lead to the outcomes.

• Medium-Term Outcomes:

  • Describe the changes that will happen as a result of the program.

  • These may take time to manifest, such as changes in behavior, practice, or systems, or the application of skills and knowledge.

  • Consider whether short-term outcomes logically lead to medium-term outcomes.

• Long-Term Outcomes:

  • Link to the overall goal and address the issue in the problem statement.

  • These outcomes may take a long time to see and will likely be influenced by factors outside the program.

  • Ensure the connection between long- and medium-term outcomes is supported by theory or evidence.

• Outcomes:

  • Answer the question: What is different as a result of our activities?

  • Outcomes should link to objectives.

  • Specify the timeline for each outcome, depending on the program.

• Assumptions:

  • Identify unexamined beliefs about how or why the program will work.

  • This could include assumptions around the participants, engagement, activities, etc.

• External Factors:

  • Acknowledge factors outside of your control that will impact your program.

  • Programs are situated in political, social, cultural, and geographic environments that influence program delivery and outcomes.

Log Frame

• Goal: Narrative summary of the overall objective.

• Purpose: What the project aims to achieve. The narrative summary describes the intended outcome.

• Outputs: What the project will produce (e.g., a proven IPM package).

• Activities: The actions taken to achieve the outputs (e.g., identifying elements, developing a package, conducting experiments).

• Objectively Verifiable Indicators: Quantifiable measures to assess progress (e.g., $20\%$ increase in net income).

• Means of Verification: How the indicators will be measured (e.g., economic reports, socio-economic studies, research reports).

• Assumptions: Factors necessary for success (e.g., mango production remains a main source of economy, use of IPM is not counteracted by subsidized insecticide).

• Example for Integrated Pest Management (Fruit Fly):

  • Goal: Increased income of farmers; reduced insecticide pollution.

  • Purpose: Increased production of good quality Mangos increased; Decreased expenditure in insecticides.

  • Outputs: Proven IPM package of baiting & male annihilation, biological control, and cultural control.

  • Activities: Identify the elements; Developing Package of IPM; Conducting experiments.

Bennett's Hierarchy

1. Inputs/Resources

2. Activities

3. Participation

4. Reactions (Experience)

5. Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, Aspirations

6. Practice Change

7. Impact

Strengths and Weaknesses of Frameworks

Strengths:

• Provide a logical structure for projects.

• Useful for evaluation purposes.

• Cover most elements of project management.

• Good templates for managers.

Weaknesses:

• No benefit-cost thinking.

• Lack linking rationale, requiring other documentation.

• No articulation of a practice gap, especially critical for practice change.

• No service scan.

• Do not cover management, design, and rationale together within the frameworks.

The Liminal Framework

• Liminal: relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.

  • Occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

Key Elements of the Liminal Framework

1. Problem & Opportunity

2. Practice Gaps

3. Objectives & Indicators of Success

4. Benefits of Change – end-user BCA (Benefit Cost Analysis)

5. Target Audience

6. Service Scan

7. Project Strategy

8. Capability & Collaboration

9. Budget & Project BCA

About the Liminal Framework

• A framework is not a template, nor is it a step-wise activity.

• It outlines elements of the design process that practitioners need to ‘go through’ to flesh out the why, what, with whom, and how of communication projects.

• It can be viewed as a ‘thinking framework.’

• It has been developed to address some of the gaps in other design and evaluation frameworks and support extension practice.

• The framework can be applied at many levels – strategy, program, project.

Problem and Opportunity

• Needs to succinctly describe why we care.

• As much evidence as possible to support your argument.

• Creates a case for intervention.

P & O Example - Feed Purchasing

Australian dairy farmers are relatively unsophisticated feed purchasers (compared to stockfeed manufacturers and farmers in the poultry, pig, and beef sectors), with many exposing themselves to significant price, quality, and supply risks. For example:

• $85\%$ buy grain, protein meals, and other concentrates on the ‘spot’ market, fully exposing themselves to market price volatility.

• $66\%$ buy grain/concentrates and $75\%$ buy fodder without always knowing its nutritional value (cents/MJ ME, $/kg crude protein) based on feed analysis, choosing to rely only on physical assessment and the price tag.

• Many do not confirm all the critical elements of a feed purchase agreement in writing with each feed supplier.

• Almost all farmers buy their feed requirements independently.

• $25\%$ deal directly, one-on-one, with grain growers and fodder producers, but most of these do not fully understand the increased quality and supply risks this supply chain option exposes them to, and the added contractual tasks they must execute, compared with buying through a third party (broker, merchant, trader, stockfeed company, major bulk handler, grain marketer).

• Most do not check the quality of each load of feed delivered to the farm and refuse to accept out-of-specification loads at the time of delivery or take steps to obtain compensation if accepted loads are subsequently found to be out-of-specification.

Therefore, several opportunities exist to increase the proportion of Australian dairy farmers using the many methods and tools available to manage their feed price, quality, and supply risks, and avoid being viewed by grain, fodder, and by-products suppliers as the “path of least resistance” for receival of loads of poorer quality parcels of feed.

Practice Gap

• Describes the practice(s) relevant to the problem area.

• Outlines a ‘gap’ between current and ideal practice.

• Is realistic with regards to who is and isn’t implementing desired practices – starts to give a sense of scale.

• Sets you up for practice change – ie: you need to know what practice you want to change before you develop a strategy.

Example

Growers with the least room to improve their irrigation management (i.e.: ‘top managers’) understand and apply the principles of matching irrigation water to plant needs on different soils in different weather conditions, have a system and labor that allows for good management, and proactively adapt their management to changing circumstances without being adversely affected by other farm operations. It is estimated that ‘top managers’ make up less than $10\%$ of farms in the region. In contrast, an estimated $30\%$ of farms tend not to understand and/or apply these principles consistently and frequently under or over water, sometimes limited by constraints of their system.

Objectives & Indicators of Success

• Objectives describe the nature of change.

• Indicators are things we track or measure to see if change is occurring.

• An objective can be simply describing the change in each relevant indicator.

• Typically your objective is about bridging the practice gap.

Example – Feedbase Challenge

Feedbase Challenge groups have been designed to support practice changes on-farm which lead to consistent, year-in-year-out achievement of the three industry feedbase KPIs:

• 1 tDM/ha per 100mm of rainfall & irrigation

• 1 kgMS/kg cow liveweight

• Feedcosts below $40\%$ of total farm income

The objective of the project is to support change in farm practice to ensure:

• $75\%$ of participants improve performance in home-grown forage consumption with an average improvement of $10\%$.

• $75\%$ of participants improve performance in milk solids production with an average improvement of $5\%$.

• $90\%$ of participants improve KPI 3 with an average reduction in feed costs as a proportion of income of $5\%$.

Benefits of Change – End User

• Benefit is what arises out of the change – what is the result of bridging the practice gap?

• Benefit cost analysis, which includes:

  • List the benefits

  • Quantify the benefits

  • Value the benefits

  • Adjust as required

Farm Level BCA Example

• For South West Victoria, a $10\%$ improvement in home-grown feed consumption yields 700kgDM/ha, and a $5\%$ improvement in Milk Solids production delivers 25kg MS per cow.

• For a farm of 120 ha and 300 cows, this equates to 84 tonnes of DM and 7,500 Kg MS.

• Using an average price of $200/tonne DM and $5 kg/MS, the per farm gross benefit for $10\%$ improvement in KPI 1 is $16,800 and for a $5\%$ improvement in KPI 2 is $37,500.

• The total per farm gross benefit is $54,300 per year.

• If we assume that the farm operates with $40\%$ of income removed in costs, this leaves $60\%$ net benefit to the farm which equates to $32,580.

CBA Table

Target Audience

• Who do we need to work with?

• Where are they?

• How many of them are there?

• What is the best way to segment our audience?

  • Scale?

  • Geography?

  • Soils?

  • Climate?

  • Practice?

  • Attitudes?

The aim is to ensure you do not ignore the diversity that is out there.

• Vegetable farm characteristics by size, production, and location in Australia (graphs).
  *Based on a survey of vegetable growers, the engagement on training/education type in NSW, Vic, Qld, SA, WA and Tas. include the following:

• Field days/demonstration sites; Conferences; Workshops/short courses; TAFE; University; Specialist training; Other.
  *Based on the survey of vegetable growers, the intentions for practice change in NSW, Vic, Qld, SA, WA and Tas. include the following:

• Expand mechanization; Introduce or expand technology use;
  Increase scale of operation; Improve financial management;
  Introduce higher yielding varieties; Introduce genetically modified vegetables;
  Nothing, already as productive as possible; Other.
  *Based on the survey of vegetable growers, the intentions for the future in NSW, Vic, Qld, SA, WA and Tas. include the following:

• Continue with vegetable production;
  Change to other agricultural production;
  Leave agriculture;
  Continue vegetable production and diversify to other agricultural production;
  Other.

Service Scan

For the target audience and the problem area:

• Who is doing what (or not)?

• How are they going about it?

• Where are they doing it (or not)?

• Who are they engaging (or not)?

From this, we can work out what our role is with whom, which defines the project scope.

• People and Services: Agronomists, VegNet staff, Water authorities, Consultants, AusVeg Networks, Researchers, Irrigation management.

• Tools and Resources: Tech notes, BoM Irrigation planning tool, Field days, Newsletters, Research papers, Soil testing, QA systems. A focus area is determining where we fit.

Project Strategy

• Designing a delivery strategy that considers the type of change sought with the target audience.

• Basically, a series of deliverables/delivery activities.

Here we specify for each type of delivery activity:

• What the project will deliver (when & where)

• To whom

• For what change

Examples

Summary

• A design approach enables a strong rationale for action.

• The result is targeted communication activities.

The key elements of a design approach combine a detailed understanding of:

• What

• Why

• For Who, By Who, and with Who

• How

• How Much

• And How we know