A couple of weeks ago, I headed south to Salem, Ore., to assist in hosting a farm tour at Rickreall Dairy, a farmer-owner of our client, dairy co-op Darigold. While the time away from the office, interacting with the cows and enjoying the fresh air, feels like an adult field trip, there is a lot of planning that goes into hosting this event and making it successful.
Last year, we hosted a tour at a farm in Washington state that highlighted the most important part of Darigold’s story: the farmer-owners. After this event, we realized that no one could illustrate the passion and dedication that goes into producing high quality and operating a sustainable and responsible dairy better than the farmers themselves.
The goal of this event was to invite media to tour the farm and speak directly with the farmer to understand the daily operations of a dairy—everything from the cow nutrition plan and milking the cows to nutrient management systems and sustainability practices. We viewed this as an excellent opportunity to show journalists and consumers how milk is produced, as well as build positive sentiment with the farmers at the heart of Darigold.
Having hosted an event similar to this before, we had a general understanding of what was ahead of us, but as with any campaign, event or activity, it is always important to analyze the results and understand what went well, what could have gone better, and what we should keep in mind for next time. After debriefing this year’s tour, we want to share our key takeaways from the event:
- Plan around a news hook. As we began to plan the event several months ago, one of the first steps was to identify a farm that would be able to host a tour. During the decision-making process we considered a variety of items, including the farmer’s comfort level with hosting visitors and speaking to media, the story of the farm and farmer, and the location. As we considered each of our requirements, we had a number of farms on our list, but when we received the good news that Rickreall Dairy had won the Outstanding Dairy Farm Sustainability Award, making it the first the dairy in Oregon to do so, it was clear which farm would host the tour. The recent honor would provide us with an intriguing news hook that would likely encourage greater attendance—and it did, with six reporters from five different publications attending the event.
- Beware of Fridays during the summer. As we all know, summer is a hard time to track down anyone, journalists included. People are on vacation throughout the summer, but especially on Fridays. Once we began pitching, we received a decent number of responses. Unfortunately, they weren’t exactly what we were hoping for. Many people were on vacation for the Friday we planned the tour. However, we were able to work with them, as well as managing editors or assignment editors, to identify alternative contacts that were available to attend the tour. In the future, mid-week days would likely lead to fewer conflicts in availability.
- Pitch broadcast media closer to the date. In order to ensure the tour was on calendars early, and for the point made above, we reached out to all media well ahead of the event. While I think this was helpful because the event was on journalists’ radar early on, we likely could have waited a bit longer to pitch broadcast. As you likely know, broadcast does not begin planning the programming for the day until the morning of that particular day. While we knew this point when we began media outreach, a specific outreach plan became clearer after speaking with a number of newsrooms. We started outreach about three and a half weeks in advance of the tour. I would still allow that time for print media, however, with broadcast, I would send an email detailing the event about two weeks before. A week before the event, I would conduct follow-up outreach via phone and email to the newsroom and assignment editor to ensure the event is on the calendar. Next, plan to follow up with the assignment editors after the newsroom’s morning planning meeting to determine if your event is one that they plan to attend that day.
- Leverage social media to make the most of the event. As you can assume, hosting this event takes a lot of time and coordination, not only on the PR team’s part, but also from the farmer, so it is very important to make the most of the event. Social media is a great way to continue amplifying the event and the resulting coverage. While I walked along the tour with the farmer and journalists, I took pictures of the farm and of the farmer interacting with the media. Once we wrapped up the tour, I was immediately developing posts to accompany the images to share over the farm’s Facebook page. Once the posts were live Facebook, we worked with Darigold’s social-media team to share the posts from their Facebook handle. In addition to this, as the coverage has published, we’ve shared each piece from the social media handles to continue widening the reach of the tour.
Overall the event was a great success, leading to four pieces thus far and with more to come. I look forward to next summer’s tour!
- Rickreall Dairy wins national sustainability award—The Statesman Journal, 7/28/17
- Oregon Dairy honored for its sustainable practices—Capital Press, 8/1/17
- Rickreall Dairy wins innovation award for sustainable practices, happy cows—KATU, 8/2/17
- Rickreall Dairy Earns ‘Sustainability’ Award—Polk County Itemizer-Observer, 8/2/17