Building Extension's Public Value

Nancy Franz of Iowa State University Extension has alerted me (and the rest of the her Public Value Network listserv) to the California 4-H program's involvement of volunteers and staff in a statewide effort to develop public value stories. On the program's California Public Values web page, a survey link invites volunteers and staff to participate in the effort to "shape California 4-H's public values that will be shared with the broader community that has a stake in 4-H."

The survey asks respondents to identify (1) positive benefits to youth from participating in 4-H, (2) ways society benefits from those positive youth outcomes, and (3) community or state benefits from adult volunteer participation in the 4-H program.

"Crowdsourcing"--at least from select sources, such as those working with 4H across the state--sounds like a potentially efficient way to assemble a body of program impact stories. Local program staff can bring to administrators' and evaluators' attention impacts that might otherwise have been overlooked. I am eager to hear how the California 4H public value project develops.

Posted by Laura Kalambokidis at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last year I presented to faculty from University of Minnesota's Research and Outreach Centers (ROCs) about communicating the public value of research, outreach and engagement scholarship for promotion and tenure purposes. Since then I've had others ask me about whether and how the public value approach can be useful in documenting scholarly accomplishments.

The guidance I came up with is pretty similar to what I wrote about here: begin with the end in mind. Basically, a scholar who aims early on for public value-level impacts and outcomes, and then evaluates and documents those outcomes, will have built a strong case for her work's public value. Because each step in creating public value involves scholarship--of research, engagement, teaching, and evaluation--the scholar who meticulously documents her contributions should, in the end, be well-positioned to defend her record.

I know, with all of the demands on outreach and engagement faculty, this is easier said than done. I know clients and community-members expect these faculty to engage in activities that are hard to classify as scholarship. But I do think that leading with the end game can help a faculty member prioritize for success.

I also wrote in this blog entry about ways that the public value approach can help close the loop between research and engagement. The research-design-engagement-evaluation loop illustrated in that entry provides a number of opportunities for a scholar focusing on engagement work--in contrast with outreach education--to document her contributions and impact. How did you contribute to (1) the research that underpins the program curriculum, (2) the program design, (3) the engagement itself, (4) the program evaluation? It seems to me that viewing your engagement program in the context of the loop can bring to mind scholarly contributions that you might not have thought to document. Perhaps it can even lead to a more complete promotion and tenure case.

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At last week's 2013 PILD conference, I heard about a couple of national initiatives that, once developed, should help Extension organizations share impact data that can inform public value messages. In my own comments at the conference, I supported cross-state sharing of ideas, so I was encouraged to hear about these national projects.

First, I think it was NIFA director Dr. Sonny Ramaswamy who mentioned an effort this summer to develop a national portal for impact reporting that will consolidate Extension program impact results.

Second, I believe it was ECOP chair Dr. Daryl Buchholz who highlighted ECOP's Measuring Excellence initiative. It appears that this project is meant to define and demonstrate excellence and to report impacts for Cooperative Extension as a whole. From the website: "Cooperative Extension has advanced from merely reporting inputs and outputs to documenting outcomes and impacts of its programs. However, most of these measures are tied to specific programs. They are not generally assessed or considered at the organizational level." While the "excellence" part of the website is well-developed, the pages having to do with impact are still under construction. I look forward to the work that will populate these pages with resources and guidance for Extension impact teams. Meanwhile, I have to give a shout out for the public value statements on the front page of the website!

By the way, my notes from the PILD keynote talks are a little sparse. If I am wrong about which speaker spoke about which initiative, please correct me in the comments. And if you know more about how the portal or the Measuring Excellence project can strengthen Extension's public value case, please share that, too!

(Photo credit: USDAgov on FlickR)

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A couple of posts ago I highlighted the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine's (CIRM's) elevator pitch challenge for its fund recipients. I linked to CIRM's #sciencepitch web page that contains links to the grantees' videos. But I failed to draw your attention to the video on the front page that depicts CIRM's Director of Public Communications, Kevin McCormack, introducing the challenge. He asks, "Do people's eyes glaze over when talk about your research?" and "Do reporters hang up on you when you talk about your work?" Check out the video for amusing scenes of researchers struggling to hold a co-worker's or a reporter's attention. Do Extension advocates ever struggle in the same way? ;-)

In the video, McCormack offers tips for constructing an effective pitch: make the pitch "short, simple, clear, articulate, informative, engaging, even entertaining." All of those adjectives could apply to an effective public value message for an Extension program, with a few more suggestions shown in the slide below

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Earlier this week I spoke at the 2013 PILD Conference in Alexandria, VA. The title of my talk was "You can understand and effectively communicate the public value of Cooperative Extension," but once I was done preparing my remarks, the title might as well have been, "In search of the elusive public value-level impacts."

Because the goal of the public value approach is to persuade stakeholders--specifically, the non-participant payers of Extension programs--we must credibly argue that our programs will lead to impacts that affect the whole community, not only the participants. The Holy Grail of the public value approach, then is public value-level impacts. In the parlance of the UWextension Logic Model, these are long-term outcomes or impacts: Changes in social, economic, environmental, or civic conditions. Improved water quality, reduced public health costs, greater economic vitality and resilience, higher property values, lower taxes, lower crime rates, more effective leadership.

To address this challenge, Extension organizations can begin with the end in mind, where the "end" is those elusive public value-level impacts. The fact is, not all of our programs were designed to achieve condition changes, and few come packaged with evaluation plans designed to document that level of impact. Keeping that need in mind can help us address this deficit as we move forward.

The action steps in the previous slide illustrate the inherent multi-disciplinarity of the public value approach. For each of the action steps, I have listed the skills or disciplines that I thought could contribute to the success of that step. For example, to effectively determine which public value-level impacts to pursue will require experts in community engagement, facilitation, public and legislative relations, and grant-writing as well as the program area's subject matter scholars. You may disagree with my list or think of others to add. But we can probably agree that if multi-disciplinarity is a key ingredient to developing strong public value messages, then Extension, as a naturally multi-disciplinary system, is well-positioned to create its own future.

Another encouraging observation is that no Extension organization has to tackle the public value challenge alone--nor should it. We are all working on the same action steps for programs that have similarities across states. Working together and sharing ideas across states we can learn the best ways to tackle each of the steps, and make more efficient use of our resources.

Finally, putting these ideas together can help us strengthen Extension's public value case and contribute to the organization's sustainability.

Were you at the PILD conference? Do you agree or disagree with my comments? What did I miss that is important to your organization's ability to make a public value case?

Posted by Laura Kalambokidis at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This year's Public Issues Leadership Development (PILD) Conference, to be held April 21-24 in Alexandria, VA, has been organized around the theme of "What you CAN do!" The program is packed with practical guidance on how to effectively advocate for Extension with elected officials and stakeholders. There will be two opportunities to hear about the public value approach to communicating about Extension programs. On Monday I will give a keynote talk,"You CAN Understand and Effectively Communicate the Public Value of Cooperative Extension." I will give a brief introduction to the public value approach and then present my current thinking about how Extension organizations can make a stronger public value case going forward. Then on Tuesday, I will teach a mini Building Extension's Public Value Workshop for any conference attendees who have not been through the program or who would like to apply the approach to a program of their own. I hope to see you there!

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Earlier this year the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) held what they called an Elevator Pitch Challenge. The goal of the challenge was to help researchers who get funding from the stem cell agency do a better job of communicating with the public. They invited any researcher who gets CIRM funding to prepare a 30 second videotaped pitch, keeping it short, simple and something anyone can understand. CIRM staff then voted who they thought did the best job.

The resulting videos are posted on the CIRM website and on Youtube under the hashtag #sciencepitch.

As CIRM's press release says, "We are a publicly funded agency and the money we use to fund research comes from the people of California, so it's only reasonable to expect researchers to be able to explain the importance of what they do to Californians, and anyone else they might meet."

Sound familiar? This is the same challenge the public value approach presents to Extension programs: Explain to people with no connection to your program why they should fund it. I haven't seen any public value messages on video, but there's no reason it couldn't be done. Has your organization asked Extension programs to record a public value "pitch"? Should we give it a try? If we assembled a series of videotaped messages, what would be the most effective use of them? Maybe we can start an #Extensionpitch Youtube channel to share our efforts and spark ideas of how to use the videos.

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My paper, "Creating Public Value with Tax and Spending Policies," for the Center for Integrative Leadership's Creating Public Value Conference is now available online, along with the other foundation papers for the conference. And my contributed paper for the same conference, co-authored with Lisa Hinz and Scott Chazdon, is available with the other contributed papers here. Please keep in mind that the papers are all conference drafts and shouldn't be cited or quoted without the authors' permission. So, if you are interested in how a wide range of scholars view the creation of public value, register for the conference (September 20-22 in Minneapolis), read the papers, and come ready to discuss them with the authors and other conference participants from around the country. See you there!

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Today in her blog, "Food Politics," Marion Nestle summarizes some recent estimates from the Campaign to End Obesityof the cost of obesity in the United States. Nestle sounds reluctant to take the estimates at face value, but admits, "One thing is clear: obesity is expensive, personally, economically, and politically."

Extension programs of many types aim to reduce the incidence of and costs associated with obesity. Not only nutrition education programs, but some agriculture programs (farmers markets, local foods), youth programs, and even community leadership programs seek to improve health and impact the obesity problem. And to be effective with non-participant stakeholders--to demonstrate public value--these programs would like to report the dollar value of savings they have helped generate for state and local governments and for communities. Can estimates such those released by the Campaign to End Obesity help Extension programs make their case?

Do you work with programs that address obesity and its impact on communities? Have you found estimates of the cost of obesity that can be used to support your program's public value? Do you focus on public health costs--which affect all community members--or have you found a way to incorporate even the impact on private health care costs into a public value message?

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An Extension program creates public value when its positive impact extends beyond the program participants to the greater community. Documenting that a program has created public value, therefore, requires measuring system- or community-level impacts. How often do evaluation studies measure the kinds of impacts that can be classified as public value? In an article in the most recent (April 2012) Journal of Extension, Jeffrey Workman and Scott Scheer try to answer that question. The article, titled "Evidence of Impact: Examination of Evaluation Studies Published in the Journal of Extension," examines program evaluations published in JOE to determine the levels of impact they reached. They considered two impact hierarchies. In Bennett's Hierarchy (from "Up the hierarchy," by C. Bennett in the March 1975 JOE) the highest of seven levels is "end results," which would include such community-level impacts as a stronger economy or improved environmental conditions. In the Logic Model, these kinds of changes in social, economic, civic, and environmental conditions are called "long-term outcomes." Workman and Scheer found that about 5.6 percent of the studies they surveyed reported impacts at these levels.

The authors conclude that "more higher-level evidence of impact is needed." They write that Extension's "ultimate goal is to remain relevant and of value to the public. The strongest method to demonstrate relevancy and public value is to document "true impact" (end results/long-term outcomes)."

Do the authors' findings ring true for you? Are only a small percentage of programs able to demonstrate public value-level impacts? Is it because few programs are achieving that level of impact? Or because the resources have not been available to measure programs' long-term impacts?

Posted by Laura Kalambokidis at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Have you studied the scholarship on defining, measuring, and creating public value outside of Cooperative Extension? Wonder how disciplines other than economics define and discuss public value? (Spoiler alert: They don't all see eye to eye with economists!) Then you may be interested in an upcoming conference sponsored by the Center for Integrative Leadership at the University of Minnesota. The conference, titled Creating Public Value in a Multi-Sector, Shared Power World will be held in Minneapolis September 20-22, 2012.

I wrote one of the foundation papers for the conference on the topic of "Creating Public Value with Tax and Spending Policies." While not specifically about Extension programs, the definition of public value I use in the paper is the same as that used in the "Building Extension's Public Value" workshop. We were asked to summarize our papers in five key points, which is a great idea when conference-goers have a lot of papers to digest. Here are the key points from my paper:

1. According to the framework rooted in public sector economics, market failures (such as externalities, information gaps, and public goods) call for cooperative action to make society better off. Which sector should take the action--government, nonprofit, informal--depends on the type of organization that can most cost-effectively address the market failure. Whichever kind of organization acts, effectively addressing market failure can create public value.

2. Governments can create public value by focusing tax and spending policies on (1) achieving economic efficiency by addressing market failure and (2) addressing concerns about fairness embodied in the social welfare function.

3. An optimal tax and transfer policy raises the revenue necessary to fund desired government activities in a way that maximizes social welfare, thus achieving society's redistributive goals, subject to technological and natural resource constraints.

4. The process through which policies are adopted does not resemble the planner's problem in social choice theory. Political structures and government's own failures combine to ensure that real fiscal policies are not the same as the recommendations that arise from the optimal tax literature.

5. Many tools are in place to help the federal and state governments focus tax and spending in ways that can maximize public value, and others are available if we can muster the will to support them.

My favorite lesson from the paper--maybe my favorite lesson from public sector economics in general--is that public value is not exclusively about efficiency, it is also about fairness. Making outcomes more efficient is only the first step. Optimal fiscal policy also addresses society's concerns about the distribution of well-being among members, also known as fairness.

One more preview for the conference: UM Extension Leadership and Civic Engagement Educator Lisa Hinz and I are working on another paper for the conference on "Using Economic Principles to Show How Extension Education Programs Create Public Value." I'll share the abstract of that paper when it is ready, so stay tuned!

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A few days ago Eli Sagor posted the photo below in his Flickr (TM) stream, captioning it, "Marshall Stewart talks about communicating Extension's public value at #ANREP12." So, apparently public value was being created at the recent conference of the Association of Natural Resource and Extension Professionals (ANREP)!

Thanks for posting the photo, Eli. I found it because it showed up in a Google (TM) alert I set up for "Extension's Public Value."

Looking at the ANREP conference agenda, the photo appears to be from a talk by Dr. Marshall Stewart of North Carolina State University on "Advocacy Makes a Powerful Difference." Indeed it does!

So, were any readers at the ANREP conference and can share the gist of Dr. Stewart's message? Eli?

Posted by Laura Kalambokidis at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There has been a lively discussion about communicating the public value of youth development programs on "Youth Development Insight," a blog of the University of Minnesota Extension Center for Youth Development. Community program specialist, Joanna Tzenis argues that youth programs can create public value by having society-level impacts. Examples of two such impacts are building trust among community members and youth becoming agents for change in their communities. You can check out the discussion here.

Posted by Laura Kalambokidis at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Elements of a program's design can influence how much public value the program can create. Module 9 of the Building Extension's Public Value Presenter's Guide lists a number of those elements:

When I was at the 2012 Women in Agriculture Educators National Conference last week, I was reminded of the risk management education program for farm and ranch women known as Annie's Project. It is an example of a program that achieves its impact by targeting a carefully selected audience: women who are motivated to be involved in a farm or ranch business. Not knowing much more about the project than that, I wondered how the Annie's Project curriculum is tailored to its target audience. After all, if the program could achieve its objectives using all the same approaches as a traditional risk management education program--which historically were targeted to men--then it wouldn't be necessary to have a separate program for women.

I have learned, partly from this 2010 Journal of Agricultural Education article by Lynn Hambleton Heins, Jeff Beaulieu, and Ira Altman, some of the ways that Annie's Project is designed to be particularly effective with farm women learners. For example, the curriculum recognizes that women typically play different roles in the farm business and have different motivations for being involved in the business than men do.

I have also read and heard elsewhere--not in the Heins, Beaulieu, Altman paper--that the Annie's Project uses educational approaches that address the specific learning needs of women, who learn better in supportive environments with other women. I haven't found an article that describes these specific educational approaches or presents evidence that they are more effective with women learners than approaches used in traditional risk management classes. If any readers know of such a source, please let me know. With that evidence, I think Annie's Project can be a fine example of a program that maximizes its public value through careful program design.

Source: Hambleton Heins, Lynn, Jeff Beaulieu, and Ira Altman. "The Effectiveness of Women's Agricultural Education Programs; a Survey from Annie's Project." Journal of Agricultural Education 51,4 (2010):1-9.

Posted by Laura Kalambokidis at 9:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Module 7 of the Building Extension's Public Value workshop leads participants to answer the question "Why Extension?"--that is, why should Cooperative Extension, and not some other public or private entity, develop and deliver outreach education programs? We answer the question by listing the people and organizations that are perceived to deliver programs that are similar to what Extension does, and naming Extension's strengths relative to those alternative providers. The result is a type of asset inventory: a list of the qualities that make Extension a preferred source for programming or the assets that we bring to the table when we engage in partnerships. The inventory usually includes Extension's trained educators, research-based curricula, local knowledge, statewide and national networks, and connection to the land-grant university.

It can be affirming for Extension professionals to assemble this asset inventory and see the organization's strengths. However, the exercise also gives us an opportunity for transformative learning through a disorienting dilemma, an idea from Jack Mezirow that I learned from Nancy Franz and wrote about in these blog entries.

The fact is, we can only use our list of Extension's strengths to make our case for Extension funding if the items on the list are true. In the "Why Extension?" exercise, I challenge participants to think about whether their organization really does ensure that educators are using the best teaching methods, curricula are based on current research and local knowledge, and connections to the university and to key networks are maintained. Inevitably, I hear participants share that for their organization, there is frankly room for improvement in at least some of these areas.

I think this challenge can create a disorienting dilemma for some participants: they have been asked to switch from admiring their organization's strengths to recognizing some of its weaknesses. I suggest that the way out of the dilemma is to see the asset inventory as a list of possible investments that Extension administrators can make to shore up Extension's strengths. Investing in our strengths can help us make Extension's best case.

I thought about this opportunity for disorientation and transformative learning on Tuesday of this week when I lead the "Why Extension?" exercise for Virginia Cooperative Extension professionals. Were you at the VCE workshop? What did you think of the exercise? Have you taught this module? What approaches work for you?

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