News and Notes: August 2, 2021

Listening Sessions (Sign up): We will be hosting our statewide listening sessions in August and September to seek broad stakeholder input (internal and external participants) as we continue our strategic futuring for OSU Extension. 

There will be three online listening sessions for Extension professionals (faculty, staff, and students). I hope you will choose one of these to attend and provide your valuable perspective. Note: Registration is limited, so sign-up soon!

• Aug. 16 (1-3pm) – register at go.osu.edu/listen1_16aug2021
• Aug. 30 (10am-12pm) – register at go.osu.edu/listen2_30aug2021
• Sept. 8 (10am-12pm) – register at go.osu.edu/listen3_8sept2021

We will also be hosting additional listening sessions with the state advisory councils (Extension Internal Advisory Council, State Extension Advisory Council, and Extension Partnership Advisory Council) in September.

There will be an opportunity for volunteers (MGV, 4-H, and 4-H Foundation) to participate in separate listening sessions in August or September (dates to be determined).

We would also like to have listening sessions offered locally through existing late summer or early fall Extension Advisory Committee meetings. We will provide some standard questions that can be incorporated into your agendas to ascertain local feedback. These questions will be made available with scripts and instructions in the next two weeks

Key Stakeholder Conversations (1:1): We also will be hosting a number of key stakeholder conversations in August and September. We anticipate performing approximately 200 relaxed engagement conversations with a variety of existing partners (i.e., community, industry, commodity, alumni, funders, etc.). Stay tuned for more on this effort in the coming weeks.

Extension Internal Advisory Council (EIAC): The Extension Internal Advisory Council (EIAC) was formulated and met for the first time last week. The council is made up of representatives from all professional positions in Extension, our three CFAES campuses (Columbus, Wooster, and statewide campuses), various geographic locations across the state, all four program areas (ANR, CD, FCS, 4-H), and student representation. The purpose of the council is to provide input to the associate dean and director of OSU Extension to achieve the mission of Extension. The council members' responsibilities include serving as an advisory sounding board, acting a liaison between Extension internal partners and the office of the associate dean and director, OSU Extension, and being an ambassador and advocate for the mission of Extension.  The council meets three to four times/year and will have a rotation of one-year to three-year terms. Current members of the EIAC are listed in this PDF.

The CFAES Knowledge Exchange has developed a limited series of virtual research experience tours for Extension professionals starting in late July. These tours will share CFAES research right where it’s happening. The next tour will learn about urban agriculture at Waterman Lab/Franklin County office of Extension (Aug. 3), and the bee labs on Waterman and CFAES Wooster (Aug. 10). The first tour was at the Wilbur A. Gould Food Industries Center. Learn more at the Knowledge Exchange website. 

CFAES Advancement also has an array of different engagement opportunities available for prospective donors to Ohio State University Extension. Starting with some initial fall activities with Farm Science Review and Ohio State football, please let us know if you have community members, volunteers, or local alumni who may be interested in supporting OSU Extension at the state or local level. Please contact your area Advancement Liaison (see their contact information in the previous article) to learn more or suggest partners. 

Each year, OSU Extension hosts an annual urban summit to highlight and address the unique work done throughout Ohio's metro areas. The summit is open to all interested Extension professionals who believe in or want to better understand the Extension mission in the urban context. Register by Sept. 13 for this summit to be held in Toledo. Registration is $20 for OSU Extension professionals. For more information, visit go.osu.edu/urbansummit. 

-as first shared by Cheryl Buck, Extension communication manager, with the Ext-county-staff listserv in mid-June 
Email sent from any unit within The Ohio State University should properly reflect the university’s brand. The use of branded templates ensures all emails are cohesive, consistent, and accessible. As such, recipients will immediately recognize a message from the university upon opening. 

You should already be using appropriate Ohio State branding for all of your email messages, especially if you are adding graphic elements to the messages. The original university-branded templates are posted online at brand.osu.edu/branded-email-templates. However, we know that building HTML emails can be challenging. CFAES has created an email builder application with several easy-to-use assets for creating emails; AND our web team has created a shared Extension Email Builder website to which all Extension personnel can request access. 

Note: The Email Builder has also been installed on the state website, the Learning and Organizational Development unit site, Operations unit site, and the program area state-level sites. Staff members in those units who have access to edit their Drupal website now also have access to the email builder without needing to use the shared website. 

Important: This builder does not send the emails for you. The builder assembles HTML for you using Drupal interface to add in ‘modules’ like those listed on the university brand site. After you have created the email, you can preview the email in a web browser and/or copy/download the html to use with your contact list in Outlook, MailChimp, or other approved distribution method. 

The web team has built in all of the current university “modules,” and you can see a listing of those at the university brand site. The team also has created a sample email that has an instance of every module in it: ceb.cfaes.ohio-state.edu/email/example-email. New modules will be added over time; and the web team welcomes feedback about content you might regularly send that doesn’t easily fit in the existing templates. However, the process of adding options to the builder is not immediate. For any email you are producing in-the-moment, you will either need to make your content work within the existing templates or modify the generated html elsewhere on your own. 

Documentation for how to use the email builder can be found in this online PDF. The documentation is also available once you are logged into the site. Bonnie Scranton, CFAES technical trainer, can provide training for the email builder upon request. (scranton.9@osu.edu). 

For reference, if you are not located in an OSU Extension unit (but are reading this message), the CFAES email builder module is available for college users at ceb.cfaes.ohio-state.edu. 

To access the Extension Email Builder (EEB) site: You will need to request a log-on to access the EEB module. Use the Web Request form on the CFAES Marketing and Communications website, or email the IT helpdesk to get a log on. The request form is at: communications.cfaes.ohio-state.edu/web-services. Once you have a log-on for the EEB (eeb.cfaes.ohio-state.edu), you will have access to the modules and components that allow for template flexibility, so you can add and remove elements to meet your specific messaging needs while staying on brand. If you have any questions, contact the IT helpdesk at cfaesits.osu.edu. 

-per Greg Davis, assistant dean and associate chair, OSU Extension 
It is that time of year when our Extension representatives to the CFAES Faculty Advisory Council (FAC) end and/or begin their terms. The Council is comprised of faculty representing all CFAES units; and our department has four representatives: one each for east, west, central, and state-level input. Please join me in recognizing Travis West (Extension’s Central rep) for three years of dedicated service, which ended June 30. Susan Zies was recently elected to replace Travis, effective July 1. Congratulations, Susan! 

Department faculty who will continue to serve are Ed Lentz (West rep.), Eric Barrett (East rep.), and Dianne Shoemaker (state rep). These faculty represent the Department of Extension on the Faculty Advisory Council, and they inform department faculty meeting agendas and meeting dates. Feel free to connect with our reps on faculty matters of concern at the college and departmental level. To learn more about the Council, contact any of our representatives or visit the Faculty and Staff Affairs website. 

-per Cheryl Buck, Extension communication manager Many thanks to Marlee Stollar, who worked as a graduate student associate in the director’s office this summer, while also completing an internship with the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission. She has worked for Extension for several years through her roles as the Community Development student assistant and a past student associate in the director’s office.

Marlee has assisted with several communication projects over the past couple of months, including updating and posting FAQs and other info on our COVID-19 resources pages; archiving online all 2020 issues of News and Notes; developing several 2021 issues of News and Notes and a related style guide; compiling land-grant history background materials for public use soon; and preparing some items for Farm Science Review. You will also see her other work as soon as we are able to post online some new documents and instructions. This includes some new Zoom backgrounds, a job aid for the Extension Personnel Directory, marketing campaign materials and resources, Extension success story curation, and tweaks to the infographics (and instructions) that she designed and developed for Extension last summer. 

Marlee graduated from The Ohio State University in May 2020 with a bachelor's degree in agricultural communication and a double minor in agribusiness and professional writing. She is now a second-year master’s student with an agricultural communication specialization. Her research areas are agricultural communication, food nonprofit organizations, and consumer food and nutrition knowledge. In the future, Marlee would like to manage communications for a nonprofit organization focusing on food and nutrition education and food access. 

Learn new skills that are important to help advance your career. Staff can apply to access a free LinkedIn Learning License, provided by Human Resources and the University Staff Advisory Committee. With on-demand learning, you have 24/7 unlimited access to more than 5,000 video tutorials covering business, creative and technology topics. Courses on a wide variety of subjects are available on-demand. Learn more on the Gateway to Learning website. 

Join the Employee Assistance Program for a 30-minute workshop on Aug. 10 from 11:30am-noon to identify your needs in the transition back to non-quarantine work life and develop some approaches to help with the adjustment. Plus learn a healthy habit you can incorporate into your work day with Virgin Pulse! Register for the webinar here.