2023 Title Promotion

Extension Agent/Area Specialize Agent Narrative Prompts

The following 5 sections are to be addressed in the submitted narrative. Your total response is limited to 25 pages, 12 point font including any tables, graphs, and images.

Introduction:

• Briefly describe yourself, characteristics of your county, your role within extension, or any other relevant information you would like to share with the committee.

Program Planning:

• Situation Statement: Describe why a Program was needed and how you determined there was a need. Provide needs assessment results and relevant data to substantiate why comprehensive research-based programming was needed. Explain how you collected and used community data to identify and prioritized issues or needs in the county/counties you serve. Describe how program advisory committees, clientele, underserved audiences and stakeholders contributed to identifying and prioritizing local issues and educational needs. Identify how statewide goals, faculty expertise, emerging issues, or the needs of new or underserved audiences played a role in the prioritization of program needs.
• Partnership Development: Describe partnerships and coordination with other Extension program areas, across counties, with Extension Specialists and Area Specialized Agents, and other organizations to develop your program and meet the needs of diverse audiences. Illustrate ways your program advisory committee contributed to the program development process.
• Planning Framework: Provide an overview of your Extension Program, the audience, and the opportunities or problems being addressed. Include the program goals (the long-term expectation of what should happen as a result of your program) and objectives (the results to be achieved, and the manner in which they will be achieved). Describe or illustrate your comprehensive program model used to address the identified problem or issue using the program planning framework, model, or theory of change that guided your planning of multiple activities that built on and reinforced each other to achieve your program objectives (behavioral, social, economic, or environmental outcomes). Identify the major program activities and describe how you identified and selected Extension developed or approved curricula, Extension publications and other research-based content, and/or worked with Extension Specialists to adapt or develop content appropriate for the intended audiences and what was selected for inclusion for each audience.
• Funding & Resources: Discuss efforts to secure additional funding and/or resources to support the program and if they were successful. List any grants and other resources secured.

Program Delivery:

• Educational Strategies: Describe the major educational strategies and teaching methods (meetings, field days, news articles etc.) used to deliver research-based programs and services and how they fit together as part of the comprehensive educational program to solve the identified need or issue. Provide examples of how you delivered timely and relevant educational information, using new and emerging technologies, and appropriate equipment and devices to offer learning in interactive and appropriate ways. Discuss any strategies used to address different learning styles and strategies or methods used to engage different audiences.
• Partnerships: Describe your collaborative efforts with Area Specialized Agents, Extension Specialists and community partners to address clientele needs by implementing and delivering educational programs. Discuss if these partnerships allowed your program to expand, meet additional needs or reach new or previously underserved audiences.
• Volunteer Management: Provide examples of how you built and maintained a volunteer system to deliver, support and promote Extension programs. Describe how you recruited, trained and used volunteers to assist in program delivery.

Program Results:

• Program Improvement: Discuss any improvements in the quality of your program delivery including changes made to method of delivery, program location, activities, methods of engagement, program format, and/or program content that were a result of your collection of evaluation data (end of session satisfaction surveys or other method to measure teaching effectiveness). Describe the data you collected and include data to support the changes you made.
• Programmatic Needs: Discuss whether your Extension programs met the educational needs of the community or if you needed to refocus or reprioritize your program efforts. Include data to support your programmatic changes. Describe how you collected and used ongoing needs assessment data or evaluation data for program monitoring.
• Program Outcomes: Describe the program results on your participants and on the community. Describe how you used evaluation tools to measure and determine changes in knowledge (short term outcomes), behavior or practice (medium term outcomes), or social, economic, or environmental changes (long term outcomes) by providing evidence from evaluation data. Identify the target audience(s) that have benefited as a result of the program and the key benefits. Use graphs and charts where appropriate to illustrate evaluation results and data from ERS. Include a sample of success stories to show programmatic impact. Describe the public value the Extension program provides to the community.

Marketing and Outreach:

• Marketing: Describe the marketing and communications strategies used to effectively promote the availability, value, and benefits of your overall Extension program and individual events and services and the impact of these strategies. Identify how different communications tools and channels were used to promote program availability and the benefits of Extension programs and services with different audiences and stakeholder groups. Describe how you and your program advisory committee communicated the value and impact of Extension programs to decision makers, community members, and other stakeholders and any impact of these communications.
• Outreach & Diversity Strategies: Provide evidence of efforts to achieve balanced participation by intentionally marketing programs to new and underserved audiences and providing targeted outreach. Share if you successfully engaged new audiences as a result of any innovative marketing or outreach efforts. Provide examples of how you intentionally marketed Extension’s ability to accommodate the needs of people with disabilities and LEP individuals. Provide examples to illustrate how you provided a learning environment that welcomes and supports diverse populations.