Introduction
Seeking to understand what information was currently communicated within agricultural awareness campaigns and if these campaigns were successful, the Agriculture Institute of Florida (AIF) approached the PIE Center about conducting research on agricultural perceptions and messages. Based on an examination of existing agricultural awareness campaigns, AIF planned to test some of the information in focus groups in fall of 2011.
To determine content used in existing campaigns, PIE Center researchers performed a content analysis on the websites of agriculture awareness campaigns in all 50 states. The sample of agriculture awareness campaigns was obtained by using the search terms “agriculture awareness, ‘Alabama.’” “Alabama” was replaced for each respective state search. The first five agriculture awareness campaigns in the resulting state search were added to the sample. Links were excluded if they were not related to agriculture, were PDF documents, were news stories or press releases, were duplications of links that had already been included, or links that appeared in the search results after the second page. The final sample included 151 agriculture awareness links.
Key findings
The majority of the agriculture awareness campaigns were housed within other websites, 57% of which used .org as the URL extension. When determining what the campaigns did to interact and communicate with their audiences, PIE Center researchers found that approximately 72% of the web pages included a logo, with about 41% using Facebook and 33% maintaining a Twitter page.
Several of the web pages included photographs or other visual elements, but the quality and effectiveness of the visuals could not be fully assessed. When the visual elements showed people, those people were most commonly non-farming adults. The majority of traditional agriculture visuals were fields and positive food products. Environmental and natural resource visuals were lacking and approximately one third of the web pages included animal visuals. Of the animal visuals, the majority was portrayed as living in an open of environment and were not anthropomorphized.
The website analytic results provided valuable information regarding the success of the agricultural campaigns. Only 21 (13.9%) out of the 151 web sites had analytics available. Therefore, the agricultural campaigns observed in this study were not receiving adequate website traffic. Additionally, website analytics showed that the lowest average viewing time of the websites in this sample was two minutes. The most common demographics of the individuals viewing these websites were females between the ages of 35-44.
Recommendations
To gain more online traffic, the PIE Center recommended that agricultural communicators encourage their organizations to create specific websites for the campaigns, rather than house campaigns within existing sites.
The level of social media involvement was found to be relatively low. Agricultural communicators should be advocates for creating a social media presence among agricultural organizations. Communicators should identify a target audience to ensure that the web elements will appeal to a target group of users. Additionally, communicators should ensure that the organization’s and campaign’s logos are attractive, used consistently, and complement the overall brand.
With regards to visual elements, agricultural communicators should consider including more children and families to invoke a favorable response from audiences. Additionally, previous research has shown that the public connects and relates positively to stereotypical farmer and agriculture images.
The PIE Center recommended that agricultural communicators create and maintain an effective strategic plan for their organization’s website to ensure effectiveness and search engine optimization. Communicators should also design attractive websites with messages that are easy to comprehend and remember, so that they can be absorbed in two minutes or less.
