 So why market your program? Number one, it's an opportunity to inform and update your community on the great work that you and your team are doing. It's also an easy way to build community pride. And ultimately, our aim is to help you increase school meal participation so that you can build sustainability and help to change the way people see school food. What if there was an easy way to promote your school meal program that reached audiences of parents, students, staff, and community members that was quick, easy, and free? By the end of this webinar today, we hope that you have at least one idea to begin utilizing social media to promote your program. Many of you are already comfortable using standard means to promote your program, such as newsletters or other paper promotional pieces. However, these promotional pieces often cost money to print and to mail. They also have limited reach. Today, we want to push you out of your comfort zone. If you aren't already using social media, we would like to invite you to begin using using social media tools, or at least to consider that. So why would you even want to use social media? A couple reasons include, one, they reach a wide variety of audiences. Social media gets attention. It's fun, it's easy, quick, free, and it's very relevant. Social media is what is being used today. It's touching audiences that never were so easily available to you in ways that are expedient, free, and fun. Here's a quick introduction and overview of the most used social media sites. Facebook is one of the most widely used and known social media sites. It is used primarily to connect to others and share stories, news, and content. There are over 1.5 billion users monthly, and every 20 minutes about 1 million links are posted. Facebook provides an easy on-ramp for most, and is a fun way to share stories, news, and content. It is made up of pictures, comments, stories, and videos. It's a fun and fast way to tell a visual story about your food, what was served, delivered, or loved by your students. Facebook can be used to reach your target audience and inform them on what's going on in your program. It doesn't have many limitations, and you can post links to menus, a survey, photos, stories, or even create events and invite your followers. Many school food programs already have Facebook pages, so check them out for ideas. I meant to say many of your school programs already have Facebook pages, so check them out for ideas as well as other school food Facebook pages. Here's one from outside the state, from Burlington. I can't quite read the school food project. Twitter users and tweets have become the new fads. Twitter is similar to Facebook in the sense that you can share stories, links, and content, but the main difference is that each post is limited to 140 characters. The idea is to allow users to get updates at a quicker glance than Facebook. There are 289 million active users and over 9100 tweets happen every second. Many school food programs use Twitter to get their information out there. This is an example from Ann Cooper, food service director in Boulder, and her school food project. In these posts, both Jamie Oliver, a celebrity chef for real school food, and Ann Cooper, the food service director in Boulder, advocate for healthy school meals. Tweets can just be short little sound bites accompanied by a photo. It might be a quick way to showcase a new menu item to invite students to taste the sampling that day, or to invite parents to join their students for a meal at school. It might also be a way to show a photo of students harvesting the garden or to spotlight a local grower. Once you've started using Twitter, it won't take long before you come across what's known as a hashtag. That's when you see something in a tweet that has a hash pound prefix. The pound is known as a hash symbol, hence the term hashtag. A hashtag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. Next we have Instagram. Instagram is another social media site, but it differs from Facebook and Twitter in the sense that you only post and share pictures or videos with a short caption. This is the start of the visual storytelling craze that has hit the Internet. A picture is worth a thousand words and is a quick and fun way for your audience to see what is going on. There are over 300 million active users on Instagram. Here is an example of a student eating a salad at school. Instagram is just that, a telegram that is instantly accompanied with photos and video. It takes a snapshot in time, such as this young student enjoying her colorful salad and sharing it. Isn't it fun to think of providing a snapshot into the world of school so it was photos, videos, and short stories? This could be a way to highlight a staff, a student, or your resident visiting, showcasing a new menu item. Think of the old days when we took pictures, had them developed, and then copied and shared. Now we can do all that in an instance with Instagram. Pinterest is another social media site about discovery. Users search for ideas, articles, recipes, and they're able to pin or save these findings on their own pages. They can organize into boards and have easy access to an overall visual bookmark of areas of interest them. Areas range from cooking and food to home and garden, to crafts, to fashion, and cards you name it. There are over 70 million users on Pinterest, 80% of which are female. This could be a good tool to engage moms who are interested in what you're cooking in your cafeteria. It's also a way to blow them away with photos of beautiful salad bars, tasty looking menu items, and the fresh produce you offer students. There's a big difference between saying that you have a salad bar and showing a photo of your beautiful salad bar. Schools are on Pinterest. This is an example from Dale Hayes and her school food at Rocks. She is highlighting salad bars. Recipes are one of the most popular things to pin, so get your student's favorite meals on the site. It can be a fun place to upload any images you want to share. Snapchat is fairly new. It takes the same visual storytelling idea as Instagram to a fast pace and fun environment. Users share photos or videos with their followers, but the difference is that these photos only last from 1 to 10 seconds. The idea is that since the user knows the photo will not last long, you will have that person's undivided attention for those few seconds. It is like a quick advertising to pique someone's interest. 30 million and growing is the user base, but what is most relevant to you is that the majority of users are your target audience, 13 to 18-year-olds. Schools can use Snapchat to highlight an upcoming menu item, promote healthy eating, like the example above. And when it's gone, it's gone forever. So here are just a few tips for getting started. Is someone already engaged in utilizing social media in your school or district? Is there an administrator, a secretary, a principal, superintendent, student, staff, or communication team already working on social media? If so, why not work with them? And if you don't have anybody in your district already working with social media, are you in a position to take the lead? And if you are, start small and choose just one site to begin with. Practice on your own or with a personal account. Broadcasts that you're on social media tell people to follow you. Add this to your newsletter, menus, websites. The next tip is to plan your post, create a schedule, and pre-plan what you want to share and when to ensure that social media is included in your promotion. Also make sure you designate time to manage the social media site, whether it's you or another staff member. You want to make sure that you have a staff person or yourself posting, interacting, and always reviewing content. One food service director I spoke to was planning to invite a student to help her with her social media. Another food service director suggested having an intern from a local college could be a great help. Young people already know how to use social media and its benefits. They can also train you or your staff. And this can be an exciting role for them. It's good for them and their experience, and it also frees up your time. So what do you post? The sky is the limit, but quotes, pictures, videos of things going on in your lunchroom, any news or updates, any upcoming events such as holiday, meals, or Colorado proud day or student count day, any celebrations, new items on your menu, the menus themselves, any surveys, or nutrition facts. You can also post others content. Let's say, for example, Gaby Warner from Live Well Colorado is posting, or Chef Anne from the Chef Anne Foundation is posting. Adding their posts to your page shows that the work in your lunchroom is part of a broader effort. Posting others content and inviting a core group to post your information is a way to expand your audience. Your network and your ability to change the way people see school. Here's one creative idea. Jen Staball, the food service director for Norwood Public Schools, she likes to write, and she has started creating her own blog. And in her blog, she puts a lot of amazing content that puts the focus on new recipes, her team, her salad bar, her fresh offerings, and in this picture below, she's showcasing a new grab-and-go item that she offers her high school students, which is a chicken taco salad with homemade dressing. And then down in the right corner, here's another photo she posted highlighting a scratch-made menu item that her team and a busy and less liberal chef helped create. Her blog is content-rich and not only are these items great for social media, Jen mentioned to me that her next step is to find a student that can help her link her blog to social media so that she can get even more mileage out of her content and share it with a broader community. So while Jen's in Norwood and I'm in Denver, I could pull up one of her Facebook posts, find a link to her blog, and read it while I'm standing in the line of the grocery store. This is another way to expand her audience, and it is, again, free, fast, fun, and easy. Great idea, Jen. So you still don't know what to post. Well, we've got you covered. LiveWell Colorado has created three toolkits to help you promote your program, and they're available at www.livewellcolorado.org. By clicking on Healthy Schools and then Online Resources, you can find the three toolkits that will help drive support for your program. One is the Food Service Director Toolkit, and that's for you with tips for marketing your program. There's a secondary toolkit for parents. If you have a parent in your community that would like to help lock arms with you and promote your program, this toolkit is full of ideas for supporting you. And the final toolkit is for students. Students can be your greatest champions when asked to help, and this toolkit is filled with lots of ideas for engaging students first. Each one of these toolkits would serve as the ideal companion resource for anyone who is interested in expanding their social media as well. In addition to the toolkits, we have 36 tools and templates to help you promote your program with ease that are also available on our website. This is one of our most utilized tools, the Points of Pride Tool, and it is filled with ideas on things that you can promote to others about your program. For you, much of what you're doing is old news, but for your students, your parents, your staff, and community, this is really exciting information that needs to get out. Social media gives you an easy way to do that. The Points of Pride Tool provides you with a full list, and some of those include pounds of fruit and veggies that are eaten by students, pounds of food that you might compost. You might also include pictures of your food being delivered to your warehouse. Any increases in school meal participation, any nutrition facts for students, staff, or families, any upcoming events you might have that you want to promote as well. You might also want to put one of your team members or a student in a spotlight and showcase something that they're doing, eating a healthy meal, cooking a new recipe. Tell the stories of your work, your team, your food, your community through social media, and all the while, you will be enlisting news supporters. There are a few considerations when it comes to social media so that you can avoid some risk. Number one, media releases for photos. Check with your school district to learn what their policy is on taking photos of students and posting them. Schools will often ask parents to sign a media release which allows any photos of their child or videos to be published. So if you're taking photos of the salad bar, just make sure that the students that are included in the photos have assigned media release. Some districts have strict policies about Facebook or other social media. Make sure that it's available to you to get on the social media sites while at school. And make sure you have some procedures in place to monitor for any inappropriate posts and make sure that these get deleted when and if they happen. And then finally, just bite off only what you can chew with social media. Take it slow, and if you're nervous at all, start by adding to what someone else is already doing. For example, if you have a Facebook post in your district and someone else runs it, just ask if you can provide them with some content monthly. Start there, start small. But dream big about all the possibilities. So now I'm going to turn it over to Jeremy West, who's the Nutrition Service Director. He's from Greeley Evans Well County School District 6. And Jeremy is nice enough to be with us here today. He is one of Colorado's leading healthy school food pioneers, and he's been bringing fresh and healthy and local foods to his district. In addition to the many innovative healthy meal enhancements that he has made, Jeremy has also taken a fresh approach to promoting his school meal program. And today he is going to tell us how he's using social media in his district and he'll also provide some tips on how you can get started. And if you have any questions for Jeremy, please type them in and we'll get to them at the end of his presentation when I follow his presentation with a brief interview. Welcome, Jeremy. Jeremy, please take it from here. Thanks, Rainie. And hello, everyone. Thanks for your time this afternoon. I know it's always a busy day in the food service director world, but thanks for taking a little time. And as we go to that next slide, you're going to see some of the social media items that we use. And I'm just going to tell you I am not a millennial. I'm a 40-something, and so this has been really like learning a new language. I don't speak native social media. And so over the last couple of years, more so the last year, I've really been taking some time to learn the language of social media and understanding what a hashtag is, which we touched on a little bit ago, but that hashtag symbol, which can be used in lots of formats, is really think of it as putting a piece of paper in a file folder. It just helps you sort that later. So if you want to promote something about a particular school and you have hashtag ABC School Lunch, then you can look all that up later and see what all the comments have been. In District 6, we serve a little over 21,000 students, and so we have a great opportunity to connect with our community. We're an urban school district, but in a very rural setting, and so it has that nice small-town feel. And this has been a great way for us to reach out to our community. So you can see we started with Facebook. That was kind of our first one. Then along came Twitter. And more recently, Instagram Pinterest and then Snapchat. We're actually currently just using for one of our high schools. We have a coffee shop in Northridge High School, and so we've started an account for that particular part of our operation. We don't use one for the whole department. So going on to the next slide, I'm just going to share with you some of our successes today, some things that I've learned over the past year or so of how to make social media work for you. So why do I do? What are the benefits of social media? Why have I invested in that? And my team and myself, first of all, it's very low-cost. It's often free. There are some things that we do pay for. So if we have a particular post that we are excited about, recently I had a USDA visit at one of our schools, and that went well. Thank goodness. And so we paid to boost that post. And so you can invest some minimal monies, particularly through Facebook, to promote those posts. It's convenient. I like that I can, you know, I'm out of school. I see something great. And from there, I can be doing marketing while I'm still standing in the cafeteria. I like that my staff, all of, you know, most of them have phones or my students have phones, and they can take pictures and send it to us. And we can really have that team of photographers to provide us content. And I can even do that from home. So, you know, sometimes we have to take work home with us, and I didn't get time to post during the day, but now I do. It's after supper, and I can take time to do that. So, and it's really how people communicate today. I have five kids of my own, and the older ones, they, you know, getting their eyes off the phone, you know, so they can look in the eye, it can be a struggle some days. So it really is how people are communicating. We have millennial parents now with centennial kids, and they fully embrace this type of communication, and they've come to expect it. It's what's expected. It is the new norm. And then also, you know, lastly, it's just a great way to get some feedback on our meals. And our programs, and how the customer service is going, and anything about our programs, and really start those conversations. Now, certainly there's some formats that work better than others for holding a conversation. But it's, you know, again, any feedback, in my opinion, is good. We want to know what people like. We want to know what we can improve on. Social media is a great tool for that. So I want to talk first of all a little bit about Pinterest and how we use that. And that's on our slide here. You can see some of the boards that we have up. And so those little squares are called boards, and you can have multiple boards. We had, in this case, nine. You can see that up there in red. Pinterest is fairly new to us. But we know, like they mentioned earlier, recipes are the number one thing pinned. It's what's searched for. It's what's pinned in Pinterest. And what better format for school food operators who want to promote the healthy meals that we're serving than to have it here. So we find this a great place to put information about, you know, National School Lunch Week that had happened. Some of our local purchasing efforts, food art, always shows up well there. And then any recipes that we're getting lots of great feedback at schools, we like to, you know, instead of them making 100 servings, we'll scale that back so it makes a serving for eight or 12 and put that up on our Pinterest account. So a great tool for using to showcase your food and your menus. Twitter is the next one I want to talk a little bit about. This has been such a great tool for us, particularly around promoting farm to school produce. And you can see here an example of a post that we did talking about our partnership with Denver Public Schools that have their own on-school farms. And so we process some of that produce for them. Also a great way we've kind of dedicated every Friday to Food Art Friday. And so, you know, and these are going to have crossovers. So if we're going to tweet that out, it's also, you're probably going to see it on our Facebook page. You may see it on Pinterest as well. And there are, you know, automation systems that can automate that, so you don't have to do all three of those yourself. You can automate that process somewhat. We also like to highlight staff through Twitter. You know, if we're recognizing staff for an accomplishment, it's great to just snap a photo, tell that short story. Again, it's only like 140 characters, so it's got to be short. And these are easy to share. Oftentimes, I get messages that others have retweeted our posts or boosted our tweets. And so it's very nice to, people like, it's easy for them to reshare a tweet with all of their followers. And so it's a nice way to extend beyond just my Greeley community. Others retweet this, and it goes out across the nation. Facebook is probably the one most of us are familiar with. It's been around a little longer than some. And it's just, you know, it's very user-friendly. A lot of people use this to stay connected with their family or maybe their college buddies. So it really is our most successful format. We love Facebook that we can pre-plan our posts and kind of get ahead of the game, and then it takes care of it for you. And also, you can get information back. I get a weekly report about how many people visited my Facebook post, what was the activity, what were the posts that were most popular. I want to talk a little bit about social media outcomes. So one example, recently we had an article that mentioned us in the Denver Post, and so Channel 7 news down there, so I'm sorry, I said that wrong. So we were mentioned in a post, but the Channel 7 and Denver saw that. And so they wanted to come and dig into that story, and then we had a nice piece that aired at the 5 o'clock news hour. And so that was all because, you know, it started with traditional print, our Greeley Tribune, our local paper came out, and then that got posted by us and others, also the Greeley Tribune. And so people are checking that. That's how news media outlets oftentimes find out about things going on around their community, in this case around Colorado. And so they're able to take even those 140 characters that came out. And that may spark their interest to contact your school district to be able to tell a larger story. So this was a, you know, a short post, but turned into like a three or four minute piece on Denver News. And so that was a very great success for us. Our most successful posts for us have been about farm to school work. Those are the ones that get, you know, the most reposted or retweeted. And people have loved seeing the food, you know, seeing one of our trades being served to a student or seeing food art and those recipes. So there's been some good outcomes from them. Some tips I want to give you for social media. Start small. And most things, when you're, especially those maybe working in larger operations with multiple schools to oversee, you want to, you know, start small. And by that I mean maybe just pick a format or two to begin with or, you know, don't try, you know, don't plan to post every day. In fact, that might annoy some people that follow you if you did that. It is good to post frequently, but you'll have to kind of play with that and determine what works well for your community. And also determine what you want to communicate. So I've kind of listed on this slide, you know, Twitter a lot of times we're using for celebration, things that we're excited about that we want people to celebrate with us. We're going to put that on Twitter first. Pinterest, again, any of those recipes or how-tos, a little more, you know, in-depth information can be on there. Facebook is really about all of our current events. It's going to have, because there's not the limit on characters, as there is with some others, that's restriction. We can really tell those in-depth stories and anything that I want to start a conversation about. So if I really want some input from my community, I'm going to put it on Facebook, because that's just the best way to have that conversation. And you can control that conversation. ours has a feature that doesn't get posted up to our Facebook page until it's been reviewed by myself or two others that I have on my team. Instagram has been great for us to, you know, any of those special events. Most recently we had National School Lunch Week, and we had some special celebrations at different schools, and so we were able to just share some pictures about that. And then Snapchat, again, it's newer for us. Great for those quick shout-outs. If you want to start a conversation, don't use Snapchat, because it's here today and gone tomorrow. So, but it's one that, again, our demographic, those 13 to 18-year-olds, this is the place they're going, and they like this. So it's fun because you can have a static picture followed by a video followed by another picture, and really it tells a story. And so it's kind of a fun format, but it has its limitations because of what it is. Next, so a few additional tips. You want to assign some site administration to several individuals. We're using five formats, but we have assigned a main person to each of those. So we, while I jokingly say, I think my staff totally agrees with it, but I call myself the head twit here because I'm in charge of Twitter. So all of the Twitter posts, I'm going to be thinking about those and getting those up to our site. There are others that can also post, but we limit that. We have another person assigned to Pinterest and two people assigned to Facebook. So really breaking up that administration if you have that opportunity. You want to monitor your sites. You want to make sure that the content is appropriate. You want to do that frequently. I'm blessed to have a communications department that also helps me with that. So whether it's coming from the district's Facebook page or from my own Facebook page for the department, they're helping me monitor those. And we'll send me emails saying, hey, this came across. We'd like your help in answering that appropriately. You want to pre-populate posts whenever possible, get ahead of it, life gets busy. And a lot of these, you want to be timely. It's meant to, you know, Snapchat and Instagram, it's meant to be now. What's happening now? And so planning to celebrate National School Lunch Week that happened a few weeks ago now is kind of irrelevant in those formats. I think one of the most important things I want to tell you is to get off your own pages. We are often tempted to just stand on our own page, work on it, tweak it, put things on it. But you're going to learn a lot about finding other people's pages by following them. My Twitter account, we're new. We kind of started that in May. We're up to 100 followers. We're excited. But I'm finding other people that are on Twitter and some of them have, you know, 30,000 followers or more. And those are the kind of people, if it's a relevant page that can add value, you want to connect with them because they have a broader reach. So get off your page, learn from some others and engage them. I'm going to start off by talking about our online school events. So when we released our online reduced application for the year, we boosted that post. We paid a little bit of money for it to be boosted out in that social media world. And anytime we've had local media coverage, we also boost that post as well. You also want to include social media when planning for school events. So anytime we have some major events coming up, who's going to take the photos? Do we need any release forms for that school? If it's going to involve students? What is the story we want to tell? You know, yeah, it's great food, but it's the story here that we're really talking about farm to school, or is it that parents have jumped in and helped at the school? So what is the story we want to tell? Make sure we're clear about that. We want to talk about when the post will occur. Pardon me. So is that during the event? Is there a couple posts we want to do the day before? A post we want to do the day of and one the day after? And then we also talk about what hashtag do we want to use? What makes sense? What doesn't take up a lot of characters? So we still have room to type our message. So those are my tips. With that, I think I turn it back to Rainie, and she has your questions as well as some of her own, I think, that we're going to go through. Jeremy, thank you so much. That was excellent. I do have some questions for you. And I'm wondering, when you started social media, did you have a specific outcome that you were looking for? Did you just kind of go in and start with one particular site, or are you trying to reach a certain number of people, or what exactly were you thinking about in terms of an outcome? Yes, our outcome really was to just get the community to start talking about school food service here. We wanted to be able to connect better with our students, our parents, to understand what they thought of our program. When I'm in a cafeteria, kids are pretty honest. They're going to tell you if they like your food or don't like your food, and what's good, what's bad. But sometimes it's hard to... You can't touch every student. You can't reach to all of them when there's 21,000. And so we really had a goal of just getting to know our community better, having a format for them. We wanted it to be easy for our community to connect with us. And we thought that, yeah, we're on the website, but it's kind of hard to find our page. You know, you have to click on a few things to get to us. We have an email that some people are using, but we know that people like to engage in this way. And so we wanted to have our presence just to be visible. We really didn't have targets in mind. Now as we've stepped into this further, then we've kind of set some milestones of, hey, we want to be by 600 followers by this. And when we're getting close to those goals, we'll do some things to really promote that. You know, if it's a Facebook, we're trying to get to 800 followers. Please tell all your family, your friends. Really starting with your own staff or other school people is a great way to begin to build your following because they already have a vested interest in you. And so a lot of times they're willing to sign up as one of your followers and tell all of their family members to do the same. What would be a bite-sized chunk that you might recommend if food service director could bite off if they really were from a small district and they just didn't have a lot of extra staff or labor hours or a communications person? Where should they start? Yeah, I would say if you're, first of all, if you're comfortable with any of the formats. So if you already are doing Facebook for, you know, you have a personal account with them, then that would be the format I would start with. If you've already, you know, used to Twitter, start with Twitter. Or if you have a family member. So I've got three teenagers at my house. So I was pretty comfortable with if I, you know, if I'm going to use Twitter, that they have some experience with that. They can help Dad figure that out. In our case, we also had some interns. We get some interns from UNC, and so they, some of them have been very helpful. They've, I've actually had one intern that showed me a lot about how Twitter works and explained to me the functionality of what it did. And so, you know, really find, you know, for me, it was helpful to have an expert. You know, somebody that had done this, they're comfortable with it so that, because I'm someone that you just need to show me. You can tell me about it all day. But if you just come sit beside me and let's do it together, I'm going to learn it pretty quick. And then I would just say start with plan to post once a week. You know, everybody's busy, but I think we could always take time once a week to post. And then from there, I think you want to do that a little more frequently. You know, but I think that's a good place to start. So along those lines Jeremy, are there any challenges or maybe mistakes you've made along the way that others might learn from? Yeah, so some of the mistakes were bad pictures. You know, pictures can help you or they can hurt you. So actually even on the slide, you're looking at now, if you, there's one with corn behind it. You know, having the backside of somebody is probably not the best picture to take. And so really, you know, cell phones do some great pictures. You can get a great picture out of a cell phone, but you need to, you know, pay attention to some things. Make sure you have a flash on when you need it or if you don't need a flash, don't have it on. Make sure that it's a nice clear picture that will post well. I know one time I posted a picture of peppers that we had roasted and when I went back the next day, they were pink. I'm not sure how they turned pink. I still haven't figured that out, but there is a way that you can kind of protect your pictures so that people in it, it's not that they're trying to hack it necessarily, but maybe they've tried to cut and paste from it and somehow it's messed up the file. So just make sure that you're strategic with your pictures. Again, if you're going to post pictures of students, you want to make sure that those students are okay to be posted. A lot of times I will ask them if they're older students. In our district, all students are allowed to be photographed unless they have a form on file that says they're not to be photographed, but I always double check that when I'm out of school just to make sure I'm going to check out with the administrator or the secretary and show them the pictures I plan to post and just see if they have any concerns about that. I would say another pitfall I've seen, something we've been very conscious about is don't get into an argument. It's easy to get defensive when somebody is attacking you, but I have found value in letting even posts that seem a little negative be broadcast on our Facebook in particular to say, hey, they ran out of this and my kid didn't get the pizza that they wanted. So I'm able to come in and explain how it is that we plan meals and that we have multiple choices or if they said they're not getting enough food to eat, I can go on and explain that we have a salad bar and if they want a second serving, we'll give them a clean plate and they can come back. So don't be afraid of that negative, somewhat negative post. Of course, you don't want to let any curse words on there or things that are derogatory, but just don't be argumentative but be informative. Jeremy, that's really excellent. It brings up another point I wanted to mention or question is that you seem to be very comfortable with feedback and I know that that's a concern for some food service directors because they might get the negative feedback, but what you're saying is you turn it into an opportunity to educate. Have you gotten any feedback that was just really too difficult to deal with on social media? Yeah, you know, some of the things it's odd to me that they end up on ours. When there's been a day that students or parents think that there should be a snow day and there wasn't, we get some pretty bad emails up here that they want to cuss at you, they want to say, oh, you're going to, my student's going to die on the road getting to school. So when those types of posts come, we just don't even allow them to be seen by the public. We see them on the backside, but those, of course, out for the public to see. Really, you know, anything that's related to the program and the operation of the program, I'm going to address it if it's about food waste or if it's about food quality. Now, if somebody's going to talk about a particular, hey, this kitchen manager at this school did this or about a particular staff person, I'm not going to post that. I will try and address them privately, and there are some ways that you can determine who that user is, because I want to address their concern, but I don't want to do that in a public format. Excellent. So you're really monitoring on the back end before you decide what actually gets posted, which sounds like a very important thing to do. Correct. I just have two more questions for you. I wanted to know if there have been any posts in particular that you just seem to receive a lot of positive attention. You mentioned farm to school, but it seems to get a lot of excitement. Well, I will say one recently that was a surprise to me. We decided this year, you know, we do some employee recognition activities, where we just want to kind of build that community within our school district among our team members, and so we decided we bought some pumpkins from a local farm, one of our vendors that we buy food for our salad bars, and we decided to do a pumpkin carving contest, and this was just between the school kitchen and the parents. It was just kitchen team members that could carve a pumpkin, and so we put that on our social media so that all the schools could vote, you know, who carved the best pumpkin. That got picked up. One of my kitchen managers, one of their friends with our Greeley Tribune, which is the newspaper here, and they said, hey, we would like to help promote your pumpkin carving contest, and so she sent that back to us this past Tuesday on the second page of the paper, where all of our pumpkins in full color with a link for the public to come vote for them. So again, that surprised me that something, but it creates that community feel, and that's what school nutrition is. School nutrition isn't just the school's job to feed kids. It's really a program for our community. It's helping our communities be successful because we're nourishing students so that they can be successful in the classroom, and so anytime that we can create that community, I think it's a good thing for it. Well, your food certainly looks great, and it's making me hungry, but I have just one more question for you, Jeremy. Can you kind of give us a before and after, like what did marketing feel like before you did social marketing, and what does it feel like now that you've been doing social marketing in terms of the awareness of the community and the engagement? Right, so I think our marketing efforts before were really, you know, it relied on paper, it relied on our ability to make a poster that looked decent, which sometimes worked for us and sometimes didn't, and it felt, you know, it kind of felt cumbersome. It was a process, you know, I had to plan ahead so I could give it to the printer so I could then distribute those out, and hopefully the kids or somebody didn't come along and rip them down after we got them there, and anytime you're doing posters and things like that, I think they're great, but they've become furniture after a while, so you can have this great poster, but if they've seen it for three months, pretty soon they don't see it anymore. So now that we are using social media, we have a dynamic message. We don't have a static message, so we are constantly creating, recreating ourselves through social media, and so we're able to tell the story that we want to tell and kind of help direct that. We want people to know that, yeah, we are serving healthy food, and that we are able to meet the demands of our community in our community in our community, and that we are engaging in our local community by working with local farmers and working with organizations like our university for dietetic students and our local health care provider, and so this just helps us have a dynamic message that helps feel like we're actually people know we're here, and it helps me tell a story even beyond just really. I have learned so much from social media by looking to other districts and I've learned from them, and I've been able to incorporate some things that I've found through social media into my operation to make us better. Well, Jeremy, thank you for telling us your story today. It was certainly a really rich and compelling one, and we're just really grateful for your time and sharing out with the rest of the food service directors in the state. So thank you again. We really appreciate it. And I am going to move on to the next slide here today. We just hope that you've enjoyed this webinar today. We hope that you see social media as an opportunity to raise awareness in your community, and we hope that you'll come away today with at least one tip or tool from us or from Jeremy on how to get started in advancing your work with social media. We want to thank you, Jeremy again for joining us today, for Alex for setting this up with this webinar. Please remember that this webinar and all of the nine previous webinars as well as the tools and the tool kits are available to us to you on our website at livewell.colorado.org. And again, thank you to our audience members for joining us, and we look forward to talking to you again.