Public Value messages

Many of you use the University of Wisconsin Extension logic model to guide program development and evaluation. Below is my first attempt at mapping the elements of the logic model to a public value message.

The “short-term” or “learning outcomes” in the logic model are a means to achieving the behavior changes and outcomes contained in the public value message. These learning outcomes lead the way to public value–and we must identify and measure them–but they are not the focus of the public value message. A skeptical stakeholder is unlikely to be persuaded of a program’s value be hearing that a participant learned or became aware of something. The stakeholder is concerned with what the participant actually did with that knowledge.

What I call “changes” in the public value message are called “intermediate” or “medium term outcomes” in the logic model. What I call “outcomes” are the logic model’s “long-term outcomes” or changes in conditions.

It seems to me that public value typically arises from a program’s long-term outcomes. In some cases, a program’s logic model will already include the outcomes that a stakeholder cares about (public value). In other cases, the public value exercise will tell us which additional outcomes we need to monitor–how we should extend the logic model–in order to substantiate our public value messages.

I believe that the public value approach must work hand in hand with program evaluation: it is through good program evaluation that we are able to make credible statements about our programs’ public value. 

At last week’s “Building Extension’s Public Value” workshop for University of Wyoming (see: cowboy) Cooperative Extension Service (CES), one group drafted a public value message for their land reclamation Extension program. The program provides research-based education on how to reclaim rangeland that has been disturbed by energy extraction. You can read about it here.

As I understand it (and members of UW CES Sustainable Management of Rangeland Resources initiative team will correct me), program participants might include landowners–including energy companies–or reclamation professionals, who do the reclaiming work on the part of landowners. The question arose: Who are the participants, and who are the stakeholders for this program? In particular, when the program participant is the person doing the work to reclaim the land, but s/he is working on behalf of a private landowner, should we direct a public value message to the landowner?

We might think of the private owner of disturbed land as a stakeholder, provided s/he doesn’t participate in the educational program. After all, s/he clearly has a stake in the reclamation professional being able to do a good job of restoring the land to its original–or new–use.

In my view, however, the private landowner is not a stakeholder in the public value sense: s/he directly benefits from the program through being able to hire a trained–maybe certified–reclamation professional, possibly at a lower cost than if CES had not contributed to that training. The landowner may even enjoy increased land values.

I think the public value message may be more effectively directed to others–aside from program trainees and the private landowners they work for–who have a stake in the land being restored. Of course, if the disturbed land is public land, the stakeholders are all the residents of Wyoming. At the conference, the group suggested hunters (specifically grouse, I recall), people concerned with biodiversity, and those who value an open viewscape.

What do you think? Who are the stakeholders for a program that trains a group of professionals to perform a service for a family or a business? 

In the Building Extension’s Public Value workshops, I often refer to a 1995 Nike (TM) ad campaign as an example of a way to craft a concise public value message. Nike’s “If You Let me Play” (TM) campaign used a simple, repeated “if this, then that” structure to persuade viewers of the public benefits that arise from girls participating in sports. I think the ad’s structure can be adapted to convey Extension’s public value message: When people participate in Extension programs, the community is made better off.

 

As a reference for those who have taken the BEPV train-the-trainer course, the script of the “If You Let Me Play” ad is included in the BEPV Presenter’s Guide. Even better, during last week’s train-the-trainer, a participant alerted me to the presence of the ad on Youtube. You can view it here.

What do you think of the ad? Is it compelling? Would a similar ad touting the public benefits of Extension programs be effective?  

Last weekend I spoke at the 2009 Minnesota Master Gardener Annual Conference about, of course, the Public Value of Master Gardener programs.

I am not an expert in the Master Gardener program or its benefits, but I do have a couple of observations about applying the public value approach to this important program.

First, while Master Gardeners surely create public value with the actions they, themselves, make, the larger benefits come from the actions MGs induce others to make. I think most MG public value statements will emphasize this “leveraged” impact.

Second, MG programs create an impressive range of public benefits, including improvements to food security, food safety, biodiversity, air and water quality, social capital, positive youth choices, and local economic vitality. I think some very strong messages can be crafted to highlight these benefits, particularly for stakeholders who may view MG as a “luxury” program whose impact begins and ends with pretty flowers.

Did you attend the Minnesota Master Gardener conference last weekend? Are you a Master Gardener? How do you think the public value approach can be applied to the work that you do?

During a typical public value workshop, participants draft a public value message for an Extension program and the presenter and other participants provide feedback. Most groups will need to revise the messages post-workshop before they can be used in publications, websites, or grant proposals.

To help with the revising step, I cobbled together a list of criteria for evaluating messages. Some of the criteria came from University of Minnesota Extension’s Aimee Viniard-Weideman, and I thought up some myself. Recently, I have incorporated the checklist into workshops for Texas, Nebraska, and Missouri Extension. With University of Missouri Extension, we went a step further and developed an exercise using the checklist. Workgroups started with a message they had drafted earlier and critiqued and revised it according to the criteria on the list–and any other criteria they thought were important. Each group received some feedback from a colleague from a different program area, and they revised the messages a second time. Some really strong messages emerged!

The checklist–and the accompanying revise-and-rewrite exercise–are not yet part of the public value curriculum, but I am thinking about including them in the next revision. Do you think your organization would find the exercise useful? If so, how would you change or add to the list? What other criteria do you think drafters should consider when they are writing messages for use in their work?

To get the ball rolling, here are some thoughts I’ve had about the criteria::

==This is not an exhaustive list: Workgroups may have other criteria that are important for a particular program, stakeholder, or delivery method. For example, some messages will be very effective in print, but should be differently composed for legislative testimony.
==Revising a message will involve balancing these criteria; some will be more important than others in a particular case. For example, there is a natural tension between the objectives of brevity and credibility, and a group might opt for a slightly longer message in order to present some evidence in support of their case. Additionally, there will be some instances where negative framing will make a better case than positive framing.
==The first three items–all about focusing on the stakeholder–could be combined.

Other ideas? Or can you suggest a completely different direction? 

The behavior changes that we seek from Extension’s interventions only arise once program participants learn something new: through our programs they gain knowledge, skills or awareness. For example, the Alaska Extension client below is learning how to plant a community garden. (Photo by Edwin Remsberg USDA/CSREES.)

The diagram that I usually use to illustrate a public value message leaves out this “learning” step. In two recent public value workshops–for Texas Agrilife Extension and for Missouri Extension–I presented the public value message diagram slightly differently than I have done before.

Many of us document the learning step in our logic models. End-of-workshop evaluations and follow-up evaluations often measure the increases in knowledge, skills, and awareness. And for program evaluation, that step will continue to be crucial. For a public value statement, however, I tend to de-emphasize the learning step. Because I think that stakeholders are more interested in what happened, as a result of the learning, I like to move quickly to the behavior changes, outcomes, and public value a program generates. Learning is part of the mechanism that gets us to public value, but it is not the end in itself.

What do you think? Should a public value message keep the learning step implicit, or should it receive more emphasis when we communicate with stakeholders? Do you think the (not very dramatically) altered public value message diagram is a helpful tool or an unnecessary distraction?  

You might think that after years of teaching BEPV workshops that I would have heard any and all possible questions and comments about public value, but that is not at all the case. Great input at every stop keeps me thinking, learning, and revising the way I talk about Extension’s public value.

Earlier this week I taught a pair of BEPV workshops for University of Missouri (MU) Extension in Columbia, MO. One MU faculty member drew attention to the public value message diagram, which asks for a specific behavior change that program participants adopt. The participant observed that sometimes Extension programs validate the choices that program participants are already making. Rather than inducing a change in behavior, the program serves to solidify an existing beneficial behavior. Imagine a participant in a nutrition education program who has been trying to eat a heart-healthy diet based on information he has gathered on his own. In the program he learns that he is in the right track. That validation steels his resolve, and he continues his beneficial food choices. The public value message for this program might say that program participants either adopt or maintain healthful food choices (or something more specific, such as eat primarily whole grain carbohydrates).

I can think of a time when this happened to me. A couple of years ago I read a University of Minnesota Extension resource with communication tips for parents of teenagers. A few of the tips were new to me, but many were things that I already was trying to do, albeit instinctively, rather than consciously. Reading the tips made me consciously aware of the way I talk to my own kids, and gave me a reason to persist with what I already was doing right (and change a couple of things I was doing not so well!).

One caution about using a public value message that talks about maintaining a beneficial behavior: skeptical stakeholders want us to direct our program resources toward achieving the greatest possible benefit. Targeting participants who already have made positive choices may not seem like the best investment. Perhaps we could have a greater impact by focusing resources on those whose behavior is the farthest from ideal. To address this challenge, you may need to persuade your stakeholder that potential participants who are already doing well are in danger of reverting to poor choices if they do not receive the validation that comes from being exposed to research-based Extension education. Why might they revert? The positive choices might be costly to them (in terms of money, time, or comfort), or they may be influenced by advertising messages encouraging them to choose a different path.

What do you think? Is maintaining a beneficial behavior a valid objective of an Extension program, or should we always look for ways to make the greatest marginal change?

This week I taught a “Building Extension’s Public Value” workshop for University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension. (It wasn’t exactly warm in Lincoln, but it was nice and sunny and at least warmer than here at home!) While the UN-L work groups were drafting public value messages for their programs, a few of them wrestled with the trade-off between brevity and completeness. Should they draft a message that names all of the behavior changes, outcomes, and public benefits their program generates, sort of like a logic model? Or should they draft something that is shorter and “punchier” that tells only a single story: naming a single set of behavior change-outcome-public benefit?

For communicating with a single stakeholder who has an identifiable concern (e.g., the county commissioner who is concerned about demand for public services, or the business owner concerned about property values), the short, one story message might be best. But, it might be useful for a program team to draft the more comprehensive message for their colleagues within the organization. Then Extension staff could pick and choose from the list of changes, outcomes, and public benefits to create messages that they can use for various purposes. The idea arose for a “menu” of changes, outcomes, and public benefits from which we could choose one from column A, one from column B, and one from column C to form an appealing meal…I mean: message. Different messages for different stakeholders and different stakeholder concerns.

What do you think? Do you have an idea about how to organize and implement a public value message menu? 

Last week I conducted a “Building Extension’s Public Value” train-the-trainer webcast for Clemson University Extension. During the training, I made up a couple of public value messages that included phrases such as “best management practices” and “beneficial practices.” As in: Participants in our program adopt best management practices for…

Among people with whom we share expertise, “best practices” can be shorthand for a set of behaviors or approaches that we are all familiar with. If you tell a group of Master Gardeners that participants in a program “adopted best management practices” for pest control, those MGs probably have a good idea of what the program participants are doing. The rest of us? Not so much. In fact, during the training, I tried to think of a specific practice to replace “best management practices” in a Master Gardener public value message. Being neither a MG nor an entomologist–I came up blank.

All of this is to encourage you, when you are writing public value messages, to review a draft message for shorthand language, such as the phrases above. Can you replace vague language with something more concrete? Can you replace “beneficial practices” with “built and maintained raingardens” or “stored food at a safe temperature” or “read to their preschool children every day”?

What do you think are Extension’s best practices for talking about best practices? 

Last week I gave a brief talk about “Building Extension’s Public Value” at a meeting of the Outreach and Engagement Leadership Group of Oregon State University Extension. An interesting question came up with regard to the slide I use to describe the elements of a public value message (below):

I always describe the lower right box (the maroon/pink box) as including any of the sources of public value: narrowing an information gap, addressing a concern about fairness or justice, encouraging public benefits, and discouraging public costs. A conference participant asked if the schematic could be used to explain how an Extension program addresses a stakeholder’s concern, even if that concern is not necessarily related to the common good. One would think of the maroon box as representing “stakeholder value,” rather than public value, and it could include anything that the stakeholder cares about. For example, if an Extension program team is seeking funding for a program from a corporate sponsor, they could demonstrate that the behavioral changes and outcomes of the program lead to increased customer share (or profits, or visibility, or whatever the cponsor cares about) for the corporation. The message would be, “If you sponsor our program, you will enjoy a larger customer share.”

In a sense, the public value approach already does this,whether our sponsor is in the public, nonprofit, or private sector. We try to determine what the sponsor cares about, and see how our mission coincides with theirs. By identifying and communicating the public value of the program, we are also showing how our program addresses the sponsors concerns. For example, consider a granting entity whose primary concern is local economic vitality. We use our public value message to explain how, when participants complete our program, they make behavior changes that enliven the local economy–which both generates public value (everyone in the local region benefits) and contributes directly to the sponsor’s mission.

I would not go so far, though, as to replace the “public value” box in the above diagram with a “stakeholder value” box. As long as our programs are at least partially funded by taxpayer contributions, whether from state, country, or federal taxes, I think we need to focus on the value we create for the general public. We wouldn’t want to alter our programs to serve the interests of sponsors at the expense of the public good. I think the focus should still be on how the public value that a program generates conincides with the interests of a potential sponsor.

What do you think?