More Seeds and Social Media

Daily Hours: 4+2
Total Hours: 67

After practicing my seed library power point presentation a few times and getting our outreach materials in order, I spent some working through logistics with our contacts at the UW-Master Gardeners.  It's especially difficult because they have one volunteer in charge of scheduling, so she ends up acting as an intermediary between us and the presenters, plus she just took over the position.  One thing this practicum has taught me pretty quickly off the bat was that while working closely with community organizations and services can be incredibly valuable, you are also relying on someone else, their schedules, motivations, interests etc.  You need to make it worth the time for both of you, and the logistics of everything alone takes a huge amount of time!  I've been calling, emailing, waiting for responses in regards to a handful of projects over the past few weeks, and just keeping up with how each contact is proceeding has taught me some important skills.  I was interested to know if there was a "professional timeline" for how to badger people if they haven't got back to you about something, so I asked Michael; he said his rule of thumb is generally email again after a week, call after three days.  I think I'll adopt with that rule as my own as well...

I spent the rest of Monday morning developing the Facebook page for the Goodman Friends Group.  Although I consider myself a pretty capable Facebook user, there was a bit of a learning curve for page creation and general maintenance, so that alone has been a good skill to acquire.  In addition to actually creating the basic page, I combed through my copious notes from the one credit Social Media course I took early in the summer, gleaning some guiding points and revisiting the library case-studies we did. I spent some time clicking around the Facebook pages of the case studies as well as the Friends pages for other branches of MPL.  This week I will draw upon those notes and create a mini-social media plan and guiding document following the tips from the readings, because obviously, for a social media campaign to be successful there needs to be a sense of sustainability.  I'll only be around for the summer, but I plan on leaving a google doc folder for whoever takes over the Facebook responsibility that would detail the inner workings of the page and also have a running list of posting ideas etc.

Today I went to Middleton to give a presentation on the Seed Library for the high school students from Growing Food and Sustainability, a hands-on environmental and leadership education program.  They run their own farm right at Clark St. Community School where they are based and they had contacted us because they are interested in saving their own seeds, along with the community aspect of the seed library.  I really enjoyed acting as a library ambassador out in the community; I can only hope that I get to connect people to library resources at similar events in my future career.  I made sure to plug MPL in general, taking a poll of who had library cards and encouraging those who didn't to get one.  It was also nice to get to connect with the Master Gardner who presented about the actual seed saving process after I gave my part of the talk.  He had given two of the past workshops in our series at the library and we both agreed that the partnership was working out great so far!