Event Date: Sep 25, 2013
Time: 09:30 AM to 10:45 AM (GMT -5)
Location:
Online
Eastern Time Zone
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Event Links: Webinar Recording
Information
The power of social media - for those who have access - is truly remarkable. Globally, nearly one in four people connect to social networks on a monthly basis. More than one billion accounts are registered on Facebook alone and these numbers climb every quarter as populations in developing nations increasingly come online.
But what does this mean? If agricultural projects can harness this wave of connectivity via social media, they may achieve the scale that has proven costly, inefficient, or downright impossible by other means. For development practitioners, social media tools can expand the reach of your community, strengthen partner relationships, support programmatic initiatives, and provide a vital means to increase the visibility of your public profile and engagement.
Despite global enthusiasm for social media, gaps in available bandwidth speeds and device functionality are increasing. Factors such as cost, gender barriers, and illiteracy can prevent people from connecting. Understanding those continuing technological and social gaps is critical to the success or failure of social media-based agricultural communication initiatives.
Join us at the September Ag Sector Council webinar, where Dustin Andres of FHI 360 will discuss highlights from the just-released "Social Media Handbook for Agricultural Development Practitioners," developed under the USAID FACET project. Michael Riggs of FAO will explore his practical experience harnessing social media to build the e-Agriculture community, which connects more than 10,000 ICT for Agriculture practitioners around the globe.
Please note - although Ag Sector Council traditionally features an in-person component, our September seminar will be an online-only event. Considering the topic of social media, we think it will be useful and appropriate to convene in an online space!
This webinar is co-hosted by USAID's FACET project.
Beyond Bandwidth: Social Media for #Ag Development Practitioners
Dustin Andres is a social communications specialist for TechLab @ FHI 360, specializing in using online platforms to build communities in support of development, multimedia storytelling, online content creation, and using... more analytics to increase audience engagement and collaboration. He created the online communications strategy for USAID’s FACET project and manages the ICT for Ag channels on Twitter and Facebook. He is a trainer in sub-Saharan Africa on low-cost video and social media for development and co-wrote the recently published Social Media Handbook for Agricultural Development Practitioners. less
Michael Riggs is part of the team at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) that advises agricultural development, and facilitates learning and good practices, on the use of information and communication... more technologies (ICT). He manages the e-Agriculture Community, a global online network of over 10,000 ICT for agriculture practitioners, with the goal of improving ICT’s positive impact. He created the communication strategy for e-Agriculture and manages its Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels. He is a member of the ICT4D Collective and Orbicom, and a focal point for the World Summit on the Information Society. less
Comments
Question from Samir Bejaoui: I think we generally recognize how powerful social media can be to reach different audiences but I would like to know how we actually measure its impact? What do we want to concretely achieve besides disseminating and sharing?
And a followup question from Aaron Buchsbaum (@SPRINGProject2):Samir - thanks for posing that question. I wonder if we're at the point yet to connect (e.g.) Tweets --> Resource dissemination --> Resource implementation --> health/ag/nutrition/etc outcome
Question from Andrea Fonseca, United States, Texas A&M University Agriculture and Natural Resource Policy Program: Mr. Riggs, on e-agriculture what would you say is the most important type of information you share and communicate with your readers? Accomplishments, research, events, etc. What would you say is the most successful?
Hi Andrea. I am assuming you refer to content on www.e-agriculture.org (if not, let me know and I'll provide a different response). Over time our most important information is the topic curated sets of information that are found under the menu "Key Topics". These sets continue to have the highest readership over an extended period of time. If we look at individual information objects, the Policy Briefs are clearly important. These are unique, crowdsourced reports generated by the Community's discussions.
In shorter time periods, the popular information varies from week to week. Blogs always rank highly when they are first published. Certain new news items attract a lot of attention, particularly reports on "success", but it is difficult to identify something more specific than that.
ICT do hold a serious promise and potential to assist development practitioners achieve the scale that is needed. The infrastructure exists. Moreover, physical infrastructures such as roads do not exist. However, a number of challenges still need to be overcome. The technology exists but the skills to use and benefit from it are still lacking. Many intended beneficiaries need to be empowered with skills and knowledge to use these tools. Another challenge is sustainability of the tools. While the other is to strike a balance between more targeted tools for ag dev and social media platforms like Facebook. The generation getting on Facebook in Africa are not interested in agriculture to a very large extent. Having said all of these, opportunities do exist via targetting the youths in the rural areas, ICT points in rural schools, promotion and business drive and acumen to try out new solutions. In Uganda, we have just launched a site www.qualitytrade.net that is intended to help traders build strong supply chains; and also help actors connect and find each other. It is about enhancing and promoting best practices in ag businesses. It was facilitated with funds from USAID LEAD project in Uganda that aimed to increase the trade in quality maize, beans and coffee. Such sites can then find other interesting content for the target group that can attract more users.