 All right. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Charlie Severance with LiveWell Colorado and we are here today for the great ideas to win hearts and minds webinar presented by the school food initiative. This is the first in a series of five webinars, I believe, and I will go ahead and just remind everyone that if you have problems or you need some help in the middle of the webinar, if you look up in the upper right hand corner of your screen, you'll see a little button that says more and then the opportunity to chat with us. And we can answer your questions if you're having some technical difficulties. Otherwise, I'm going to turn it over to Rainie Wickstrom, who is the marketing consultant for the school food initiative. Today's topic is great ideas to win hearts and minds. My name is Rainie Wickstrom and my role is to support food service directors with marketing their programs to build community pride, to increase participation, to sustain and grow their healthy meal programs success, and we want to thank you for joining us today. With school now in full swing and the holidays just ahead, today's objectives are twofold. One, we want to share great ideas for food service directors by food service directors to promote school meals and we also want to provide tips on how to take advantage of the holiday season to promote your program. The first part of today's presentation highlights great ideas shared by food service directors in Colorado. We wanted to showcase and celebrate the great work that is being done by local food service directors right here in our state and to share their successes with you. We hope that you come away sparked with at least one to two or more great ideas to promote your program in your district. This might be a good time to take out a pen and a paper and write down any ideas that interest you. Healthy students learn better and that is why throughout the state food service directors are coming up with innovative ideas to promote their healthy meal options. Meeting the nutritional needs of students and serving an essential role to student achievement. The bottom line is that marketing your program gets customers into your cafeteria. Savvy food service directors know that they need to not only provide healthy meals, they need to market their program for sustainability. These 11 food service directors have all utilized both big and small marketing ideas. In this webinar, we have compiled their great ideas that we would like to share with you now. Great idea number one. Do a cafeteria makeover as a means to create a pleasant dining experience. New colors, furniture, murals, design. All have a positive atmosphere on the lunch room. It also increases appeal and the likelihood that students will not only want to stay on campus for lunch, but enjoy their lunchtime experience. This idea and these designs came to us from Cindy Vinay in Adams 14 school district who's retired from that district now. Thank you, Cindy. Great idea number two. Take time and energy to make events fun. Dress up for Halloween. Decorate and name or serve food that fits the theme like which is Bruce stew. This idea came to us from Megan Missage food service director of Pawnee school district. Keep up the great work, Megan. Great idea number three. Promote a local farmers campaign. Help students know their farmers and where their food originates. Our local farmers cannot visit the schools daily, but they can have a daily presence there. In Pueblo 70, they started a know your farmer, know your food campaign. They took pictures of farmers from DeSanti farms in this photo and converted them to life-size cardboard cutouts. Each farmer is holding a sign that says today's food comes from and it provides a great learning and engagement experience for students. This idea came to us from Dan Witt from Pueblo school district 70. Thank you, Dan. Idea number four. Create your own brand and engage community partners to help fundraise for or donate to your meal program. Eagle County Schools didn't just sell a program. They created a brand with a logo as well. Fresh approach healthy food. They used a parent group to help with fundraising. They used the local newspaper highlighting one school nutrition pilot program and proposing to scale to all schools if they would could find help and a way to pay for it. They also set up a web page and facebook page for people to donate. Through communications, they started gaining partners throughout the community that donated money, time, space and freebies. They ended up with about 20 corporate partners and then started their fresh approach club. This was for parents of businesses to pay a membership. They gave them monthly newsletters, discounts at local businesses and a free lunch with their child each month. They made enough money to sustain their program and healthy meal changes. This big idea comes to us from Ray Hidal food service director of Eagle County school district. Way to go, Ray. If you'd like to learn more about how to define your own brand, check out the link on this slide from the Healthy Schools Environment Institute. Great idea number five. Engage your students. Students can be key. They can help to discuss healthy meal items. They can taste potential new items. They can give feedback and they can advertise, promote and encourage their peers to participate in the meal program. In Montezuma Cortez, they enlisted a student advisory team from a nutrition class. These students showed up to discuss healthy lunch options and eventually formed salad, which is short for students for alternative lunch and diet. They wanted a salad bar and they were willing to give up their other quick meal options if they could have a fresh salad bar with local produce included. The students held an assembly to encourage their peers to support the salad bar and the salad bar was reinstated. This message came to us. This idea came to us from Sandy Manhutan, the food service director of Montezuma Cortez. Thank you, Sandy. Great idea number five. Provide nutrition education to your students. Use resources available to you like the USDA's My Plate Nutrition Education Program to offer after-school healthy eating programs. St. Brain had made substantial changes to their program. In fact, a parent at a board meeting, Greg, that quote, you can't get a better meal in town. But they wanted to do more. St. Brain School Food Services with the help of a dietetic intern provides an after-school healthy eating program in 28 of their schools. Helping students to understand how and why to make healthy choices are vital skills that will last a lifetime. This idea came to us from Shelley, Food Service Director of St. Brain, and thank you very much, Shelley, for sharing this with us. Great idea number seven. Use a family approach. Use your own kids' preferences to guide meal options for students in your district. In Bayfield School District, Julie Whitmore, Food Service Director, used her own teens' preferences to guide the options she offers students. For example, she noticed they were drawn to Chipotle-style meals, and now she offers a sandwich bar where students are able to choose their own toppings and a burrito bar. Both are top sellers. She's also offered live banjo music to set the eating mood at special events. Way to go, Julie. Have a web presence. Ensure you offer information on a web page and get involved with social media. Littleton Public Schools Nutrition Services has branded their program fuel to live and learn and they've created their own web page, which is linked to the district page, as well as getting involved with social media. They asked around and even found a staff member who was able to develop a loco which saved them on cost. This idea came to us from Paula Boozer, former Nutrition Service Director of Littleton Public Schools. Thank you, Paula. Find promotional moments at all times during the day. Even when students stand in the lunch line. Kit Carson has found success by talking to their students while they're in the lunch line to get them excited about new meal items that they can expect to see in the future. This increases buy-in. It prepares them for the change in a filled excitement. The students have been more readily able to embrace new items. This idea came to us from Melissa Bogan-Hagen, the former Food Service Director of Kit Carson School District R1. Thank you for sharing your great idea, Melissa. Student approved and created menus. All of the items on this menu are either suggested by a student or are student approved. Educate students on labor costs, nutritional requirements, and meal allowances and ask them to help choose healthy meal items. In CalHan, they let students know that they care. They tell students to vote with their trays so they know what students like. Students have helped CalHan select many of the menu items. They have found their best ideas often come from the students, including the idea to have a second lunch line, which has been a huge success. These ideas come to us from Debbie Yerku, Food Service Director of CalHan School District. Thank you, Debbie. Design your menus and newsletters. Use engaging in attractive formats and appealing food descriptions. Hanover has been able to provide attractive and very well-received and utilize menus and newsletters. They also do a school lunch superhero day and allow school staff to nominate kitchen staff for the honor of Employee of the Week. This idea came to us from Cindy, who we'll hear more about in a few minutes. But thank you to all the Food Service Directors who have shared their great ideas with us. Now we'd like to share some great ideas from partners that are available to support your successes. This great idea to create rainbow days comes from thelunchbox.org. They suggest creating rainbow days where students use fruits and veggies from the salad bar to make a rainbow. After they eat their creations, they receive a sticker or other small reward. Be sure to check out the lunchbox website for various tools related to rainbow days, such as rainbow days planning how-to guide or their volunteer outreach letter or their event flyer or just their stickers. Taste testing days are also a tried and true idea that students always love. Vermont Farm to School offers a wonderful guide to taste testing local foods in schools. We've also included a link to a simple taste testing form from the USDA that we love. The Smarter Lunchroom Movement. This movement, which is part of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics, highlights a variety of studies that have been done on how to nudge students towards nutritious meal choices. Their ideas page showcases best practices which have been proven by research to be effective. For example, moving and highlighting fruit increase sales by up to 102 percent. Naming vegetables and displaying them with the new names increased selection from between 40 to 70 percent. And placing white milk first in the lunchroom coolers has resulted in an increase of up to 46 percent in white milk sales. And more. Check it out at the SmarterLunchroom.org website. As you plan your events, don't forget that you just don't have to do it all alone. Parents or community volunteers can be a huge help. The Lunchbox offers a wonderful volunteers and interns how to guide. They also include resources like a sample volunteer guide, weekly volunteer outreach letter, and a sample intern ad to attract interns to support you. Part two of our webinar is to highlight using the holidays to promote your program. In this part of the webinar, we're going to showcase how one Colorado food service director promoted her events and share tips and tools to promote your program. As you plan your holiday events, don't forget to think about how you will promote them. There are many easy ways to get the word out. A little tool that you can easily adapt for your event is our event invitation, which is available online in the food service director toolkit. Some great ways to get the word out are to send invitations to your school community, promote on social media, include in any school or district newsletters, use robo calls, include on your menu, add to the school marquee, put up posters, and coordinate with classroom or other events already happening. California Healthy Schools offers two great idea sheets that you can pass along to classroom teachers. The first has ideas for healthy Thanksgiving celebrations and the second offers ideas to celebrate other holidays in the classroom, and both include great recipes. Once you market your event, it will be important to have a successful event. Here are some tips to make your event memorable so that administration, school staff, students, board members, and the community not only remember it but have a blast, healthy food, and they want to come back next year. Food service directors recognize that the best way to the heart of their students is through their stomachs. Holiday meals create a memorable moment for those who can join in on the fun. Here are a few tips and tricks for making your meals memorable. Make it fun, make it social, make it a community moment, invite your local fire department, grandparents, seniors, or your school board. Try something new and invite your community members to taste it with you such as a new salad dressing or a salsa. Create ambience with holiday decor and make it smell like the holidays using warming spices and fresh breads. Now I'd like to share some great holiday ideas from Cindy Enojo's the food service director at Hanover. This is a small district with only 300 students out on the prairies east of Colorado Springs. They are a farming and ranching community. They developed a community event called Christmas on the Prairie to bring together the whole community and to make the holiday special for everyone. This is a huge annual celebration that the community really enjoys and looks forward to. All of the kids and all of the grades play some role in the event whether it's singing, performing a play, or joining in on the entertainment. The kids the event includes music, food, and at festivities. They advertise it through the newspapers, the radio, and it becomes a whole community event. The Christmas on the Prairie event is an ideal way to share some of their prepared meals. They use the sample invitation from the food service director toolkit to invite community members. Cindy has always just made her own marketing tools but she reports that she's really happy with the toolkit. They also have a local newspaper and radio station. Cindy knows the contacts of both at these and she says it's so easy just to call and send them an invitation. They're always willing to help promote their event. Thank you Cindy for sharing all these great ideas. The Liveall at School Food Service Director toolkit is an online toolkit that was developed to help you make it easy, make it easy for you to promote your program. In the toolkit you will find over 40 tools and templates available to support your marketing success. Some of these include the invitation which we already mentioned, letters to family, sample press releases, and student surveys as well as many, many more. So how do you find the tools? Start by going to www.Livwell, Colorado, click on healthy schools, scroll down and find the Livewell at School Food Initiative, then scroll to online resources, enter your name and email, and know that we won't share this information with anyone else, it's just a way to know who visits our site, and then scroll down and view the full complement of tools. So here is where you can find the tools online. We hope that you will utilize these tools as another resource to help you promote your mail program. Additionally, you will find this webinar and others like it archived on our website. Take a few moments to listen to a webinar and gain even more ideas on how to promote your program to build community pride and to increase mail participation. In addition, you will find all of the resources we mentioned with the archived webinar online. We want to extend a special thank you to all of the Colorado Food Service Directors who have shared their great ideas with us big and small, and who have allowed us to share their great ideas with you. Thank you for joining us today. We hope that you've garnered great ideas for promoting your program. We wish you many marketing successes this holiday season and throughout the year. Remember the work you do touches the lives of children every day. When students eat healthy meals you prepare and serve, you are having a positive effect on their lives. To live well at school food initiatives thanks you for the hard work that you do. Now I'm going to turn it over back to Charlie to conclude this webinar. All right, thank you Rene. Just as a reminder we have been recording this webinar and it will be posted on our website. You will also receive an email in the next 24 hours with a link to that recorded webinar. And if you have any questions you can reach out to anyone on the SFI team. All right, thanks for joining us everyone.