As online communication becomes more important to Extension professionals, understanding how promotional strategies affect the number of people accessing online content also becomes more important. We tracked website visits resulting from four different promotional efforts to understand relative effectiveness of these efforts. Each effort was…

The University of California Cooperative Extension used social media to solicit donations to support research on the Pacific fisher, a rare forest-dwelling weasel, conducted by UC scientists. The social media campaign included blog and Facebook postings, news releases, and tweets requesting donations of single socks. Socks were donated from around…

Since its inception, Extension has focused on helping individuals, families, and communities change economic, environmental, and social conditions. Over the organization's history, environmental condition change programming has been mostly the purview of natural resource educators and less often conducted by family and consumer science…

Every day, news relevant to Extension clientele is posted to the Internet from a variety of sources such as the popular press, scientific journals, and government agency press releases. In order to stay current with the information being published, an end-user must be following all of the possible sources of information. That task can be…

The widespread availability of and access to the Internet have led to the development of new forms of communication. Collectively termed "social media," these new communication tools have created vast opportunities for Extension professionals in how they perform their work and how businesses interact with consumers. This article outlines currently…