 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the LiveWell Colorado School Food Initiative's Growing Your Program through community engagement and social media webinar. In just a minute, I'm going to turn it over to your facilitator for this webinar, Rainy Wickstrom, excuse me, as well as Jeremy West, our guest presenter and interviewee for today's webinar. But first, just a few quick housekeeping items. We will be holding time towards the end of the webinar for a question-and-answer session, and you can ask a question at any time, either by clicking the Q&A button in your little gray user interface bar, or by hovering over more and then clicking on chat. And again, we will be answering all of those questions towards the end of the webinar. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Rainy. And welcome to today's webinar. We're really thrilled that you're joining us. Today's webinar is the second in a series of six that LiveWell Colorado is providing to food service directors and their teams. This webinar comes to you today thanks to the generous funding provided by the Colorado Health Foundation. Today's webinar is Growing Your Program through community engagement and social media. My name is Rainy Wickstrom, and I'm a consultant for LiveWell Colorado School Food Initiative. Today, we're going to be joined by Jeremy West, the nutrition services director of Greeley-Evan District 6, and he's also the president of the Colorado School Nutrition Association. So we'll look forward to hearing from Jeremy in part two of the webinar. Today's objectives are to provide ideas for engaging school meal champions, and number two, to share ideas for utilizing free social media tools that are available to you. We're going to be covering a number of tips and tools, and suggest you grab a paper and pen to write down or capture any ideas that you might want to use later. And we'll also, again, like Charlie said, have opportunity to answer your questions at the end of the webinar. So in part one of the webinar, we will be talking about parent and student engagement. We'll be covering the toolkits that we have available to you, as well as student feedback and some community engagement strategies. Some of the benefits of engaging parents, parents play a powerful role in the lives of their children and in the culture of a school where their children attend. When engaged strategically, parent support will positively affect your program. Parents can be champions for your program. They can provide meaningful feedback to you. They're also natural promoters of school meals to their own children, and often others. Parents definitely can play a role in a healthy food culture, such as fundraisers, healthy snacks, and they can also be a key partner and resource for your district's wellness efforts, such as serving on a wellness policy committee. Having parent champions garners buy-in and leads to increased participation. Likewise, some of the benefits of engaging students include students can join in and be a value party or process. They can also provide meaningful feedback. They definitely can promote meals to their peers, and again, they can serve as leaders in supporting a healthy school of the champion. Students are your customers, and engaging them is key to your success. They should be viewed as value partners and empowered to help ensure that voices are heard. Having their interest, support, and buy-in also leads to increased participation. To support you in your work to enlist parent and student champions, LiveWell Colorado has developed toolkits and companion tools for you. The purpose of the toolkits are to provide you with ready-made tools to engage your student and parent communities. These toolkits are for your parents and students. We see them as your potential champions. The toolkits provide students and parents with information that will deepen their knowledge about your program, how it works, and how they can help. These toolkits live online, and we will be providing information on how to access these and all the tools at the end of the webinar. So just to give you an idea of a couple of the tools that are available, this one is a cafeteria assessment. It's a sample tool that can just be utilized to learn how other people experience your cafeteria. We also have some other tools such as talking points. How do you want parents talking about your program once they know more about it, as well as some taste testing tips, and many, many more. Here's a sample of a student tool. This is a questionnaire. This now enables you to get some key input to build a successful program. Some of the other tools we have are a recruitment ad, so you can identify maybe a club in your school, where you can find a leader champion, or find a team to help advocate and champion your program. Once a team is assembled, there's an action plan to help them get started. For example, maybe students want to promote the salad bar because that's something that they've helped support. That tool can be used to help them figure out how to break that down into pieces and get started, and many more. So how do you use the toolkits with ease? First of all, you have to find ways to engage your champions. Then you need to find the tools on our website. Once you've downloaded them, choose an appropriate channel to communicate those to your audiences. Here, I've got a few ideas to share with you around recruitment and engagement strategies. So where do you find parent and student champions? A couple places might be parent and teacher conferences, accountability or board meetings, in-school newsletters or through social media, at school events and in-school clubs such as student councils or other organizations. When you recruit your champions and you're trying to figure out the best way to utilize them, here are a few extra resources to help. The Chef and Foundation has a wonderful parent advocacy toolkit that includes tools that help parents to get educated, to get organized and to take action. The Lunchbox also offers great resources on who makes great volunteers and interns, a how-to guide, a guide that sets the standard for volunteers and volunteer outreach letters. Once you've identified your volunteers, one great way to utilize them is to ask for their support with community engagement and social media strategies. After the webinar, we'll provide you with a resource so that you can look at all of these links. When it comes to kids and parents, here's a few more great ways to engage parents. Food tastings. Allow parents to taste the school food at events in which they are already on campus such as back to school or parent meetings. And students allow them to try and taste things that they might not normally have access to. For elementary students, if they try it, maybe they get a stamp or a sticker that a stamp or a sticker. You would be amazed at how many students will love this and try foods they've never heard of before like eggplant. For high school students offer a taste testing, but give them an opportunity to provide feedback. Rank the sample, provide input, and then make sure these items show up on the next menu cycle. Chef demos. You could invite local chefs from your team or from your community to come visit the school and cook something in front of the students. This can provide an opportunity for tastings. Invite students to ask questions and observe. There are also higher and chef competitions where students must cook under the same restrictions as the U. S. D. National Lunch Program. Items are voted on and then students win an award and the item is added to the menu. You could also hold a rainbow day or a junior chef competition. The lunchbox has a variety of resources to help you make rainbow days a success, such as a planning, a how to guide, a letter to administrators, a volunteer outreach letter. Students must choose at least three different colors of fresh fruit and vegetable options to make a rainbow on their plate. When they do, they receive a sticker or a stamp. Finally, we have a number of survey tools on our feedback that will help you garner feedback from students. To dig a little bit deeper into the student feedback point, I can't emphasize enough how important it is to invite feedback from students. If you want ideas on how other food service directors have done that, check out the links on this page to articles that showcase how food service directors in Texas, California, and New York have solicited student feedback and used it to improve their meals. This is a local example from Canyon City. The food service director there created a Rancho Palooza event at which they offered student samples of their new homemade ranch dressing. The event was even written up in the local newspaper. And this is a great example of how one school engaged a student champion to promote healthier meals. Steve Ristrelli was a sophomore in Pueblo District School District 60. And he served as a member of the Centennial High School Fresh Club and as a student leader for chat, which is a community health action team. Both in his leadership and student role, he provided unique insights on how food service directors could attract more students to their lunch line. Some of his tips included empower students. We want to know what the problem is and define a solution. Our voice matters and we have great ideas to share with you. His tip number two was personal interaction. That face to face interaction is so meaningful. Present to our student team so that we can ask questions on the spot, hear challenges, and share ideas to make it a win-win. His last tip was engage the student body using social media. Set up a page and write interactive posts so that students can tell you what they think of the new chicken sandwich. Students provide important feedback right then and there. Thank you Steve for providing these great tips to our food service directors. Some of these we've already covered, but the main idea is to listen to your students, parents, school, faculty, and staff. And when reaching to your community, don't forget to include parent liaison, nurses, secretaries, anybody that's in your school that may have an opinion about the school meal program. Use the resources that are available to you. There's no need to reinvent the wheel or come up with fantastic events. Just focus on using events like back to school item or a staff meeting to promote a new breakfast item. And then find your champions. They exist in every school community. You likely already have someone who's interested in promoting a healthy lifestyle. It could be a gym teacher. It could be a janitor. It may be a parent who's particularly interested in having their child eat healthy fresh food. You don't have to do it alone. Here's a few more tips we've heard from food service directors and we've already covered these, a few of these, but again piggyback on events already happening. And don't ask for help. And there was a mention in here to make sure that paraprofessionals, parent liaisons, principles and teachers are also asked to support as well. So this is a small district and we recognize that this would not be feasible in every district of all sizes. But it's just one example of what's possible. Shannon Williams, food service director in Ureay, Colorado, together with her teammate Amy Baderas, are hosting a series of community meals to invite the community to taste their healthy and delicious changes. In this one that happened last week, city council members, police and city government were quoted. For others, she's going to invite the fire department and the school board. Is there someone in your district or community that you would like to invite to dine at your table? Check out this invitation tool, along with others on our website. All of our tools can be adapted to fit your specific audience and needs. Keep up the great work, Shannon and Amy. Here's another really exciting example of successful community engagement. Dan Sharpe of Mesa Valley School District 51 identified a gap in summer food programs. Children who qualified for free and reduced lunch had no option for summer programs, facing weeks without a steady nutritious meal. So Dan reached out and asked his community for help. A local foundation, Western Colorado Community Foundation heard about the gap and provided the funding of $58,000 to pilot the first mobile summer meal program, the lunch lizard, to bring hot nutritious meals directly to children in high needs areas on a five stop route through Orchard Mesa and Grand Junction. The truck visits parks and playgrounds in some of the county's poorest neighborhoods. It brings federally funded lunch to children who might otherwise go without. The lunch lizard has enjoyed a quadruple expansion from pilot year to the following year. One truck went to two, five routes were expanded to 12, and six weeks of service expanded to nine weeks and 4000 meals grew to 16,000. Dan's outreach to his community and their response is a terrific example of the power of partnerships to grow and expand the success of your program for your community. Thank you, Dan, for showing what is possible when communities become engaged in supporting school meals programs. We move on to part two of our of our webinar. In this section, we're going to just do a one on one review of social media tools, share some resources, and finally, we'll wrap up with an exclusive interview with Jeremy West. As we continue the discussion of how to engage parents and students in your healthy meal promotion, we would be remiss if we didn't discuss social media. Social media is a powerful way to reach your community, build pride, increase participation and sustainability, and to enhance the perception of school meals in general and also to find out what everyone else is doing. Many of you are comfortable with some of the standard means to reach audiences such as newsletters or paper promotional pieces. However, these pieces can cost money and take time to print a mail. Today, we want to push you out of your comfort zone if you aren't already and invite you to begin using social media tools or at least consider them. So why use social media? First of all, it reaches multiple audiences. It gets attention, it's fun, easy, quick, free and it's what people are doing. Social media is what is being used since 2007 with the launch of Facebook. It's now touching audiences that were never so easily available to access in ways that are fast, free, and fun. Here's a quick overview of the most used social media sites. Facebook is one of the most popular and widely used. It provides a really easy on-ramp for users. It's made up of pictures, comments, stories, and videos. It's a fun, fast way to tell a visual story about your food, what you serve, deliver, or what your students enjoy. It can also be used to reach your target audience and inform them of what's going on in your school program. It doesn't have many limitations. You can post links to your menus, you can add a survey, add photos, stories, or even create events, and invite followers. Many schools and districts already have Facebook, so check them out for ideas. This is one from outside of our state. Twitter is similar to Facebook in the sense you can share stories, links, and content, but the main difference is that each post is much shorter, limited to only 140 characters. The idea is to allow users just to get quick updates at a glance. Many food service programs use Twitter, including Jeremy, who will be on here shortly, to get their information out there. This is one example with Anne Cooper from Boulder School District and also Jamie Oliver, a celebrity chef. They're tweeting back their support of real food. Tweets are just little short sound bites accompanied by a photo. It's just can be a quick way to showcase a new menu item, invite students to a tasting, or to invite parents to come to the school and try a meal. Once you've started using Twitter, it won't be long before you come across what's known as a hashtag, and that's when you see something in a tweet that has a pound prefix, thus the term hashtag. This is a hash symbol. It's just simply a way for people to search for tweets that have common topics. 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 short captions. This is the start of the visual storytelling craze that has hit the internet. A picture is worth a thousand words and it is a quick and fun way for your audience to see what's going on. This 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 and shares it. This could be a great way to highlight staff or showcase a new menu item. Think of the old days when we took pictures, had them developed and copied and shared. Now we can do all of that in an instant with Instagram. Pinterest is 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 these into boards and have easy access to an overall visual bookmark of areas that interest them. Areas range from cooking and food to home and garden to crafts, to fashion, to cars you name it. Recipes are one of the most popular things to pin, so get your students favorite meals on the site. Here is an example from Dale Hayes and her school Food That Rocks. It is highlighting salad bars. Colorful images are a compelling way to promote your program to select audiences. Snapchat takes the same visual storytelling ideas 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 one to 10 seconds. The idea is that since the user knows the photo will not last long, you have that person's undivided attention for those few seconds. Snapchat has 150 million daily users making it one of the fastest growing social media tools, but what is most relevant to you is that the majority of users are your target audience. They're 13 to 18 year olds. Schools, can you Snapchat? Sorry about that everyone. We're having a few internet problems here and I will start over here with this slide. A few tips for getting started. Although it may seem overwhelming to think about what to post on social media, it doesn't have to be hard. Pictures quotes from students, staff, and parents just daily moments are great. You can also repost relevant sources, things from sources like Chef Anne or Jeremy from really Evans. Remember, you don't have to do this on your own. Make others, administrators on your account and they can post too. Posting others content and inviting a network, a core group to post your information, is a way to expand your network and your ability to help change the way people see school. Jim Dayball, the food service director for Norwood Public Schools, likes to write and she recently started writing her own blog. In her blog, she puts a spotlight on new recipes per team and her program. She mentioned to me that her next step is to help her to find a student that can help her post on social media. In fact, one of her beginning ideas is to post on social media a link to her blog. That way, she gets even more mileage out of her content and it is shared more broadly with her community. This is just another simple way to reach a bigger audience. Thank you, Jen, for sharing your great idea. So, maybe you're not sure what to post. This list comes from the points of pride tool which is on our website. For you, maybe what you do seems like old news, but for students, parents, and the community, what you do may be very exciting information. Social media offers a way to share it in a fun, visual, and fast manner. So, in this tool, these are just some ideas like maybe the pounds of fruit and vegetables that are eaten by students in a month, a week, a year, the numbers of meals you serve, where you get your food from, and then maybe some focus on different events that tie to your program such as Colorado Proud Day or Garden Workdays. If your school participates in the Alliance for Healthier Generation Healthy Schools program, they have a number of ready-to-use images that you can download and post on Facebook, as well as sample tweets on the lunchbox, as well. Another great resource is the lunchbox, which I just started to mention. The link on this page will bring you to their page on social media. From there, there are two direct links to two fabulous examples of active Facebook pages, one from the Burlington School Food Project in Vermont and the other from the Oakland Eats Garden Fresh program in California. As you scroll through pages, you'll get even more ideas of what to post. You can even borrow from their content by sharing it to your page. I also recommend checking out Chef Anne's Do One Thing page to see a great example of how social media really can change food. And finally, the Center for Ecoliteracy has relevant high-quality articles and downloads that are great content to share on social media. So a couple considerations when using social media. First of all, make sure that you get media releases for your photo. Check with for your photos of students. Check with your school district policy to see what's required. You definitely want to make sure you avoid risks. Also, does your school allow access to social media sites? Or are there restrictions in place? And then finally, monitor for inappropriate posts and deletes. Bite off only what you can chew. Take it slow, and if you're nervous, start by adding to what someone else maybe is doing. For example, if you have a Facebook page in your district and someone else runs it, you might just be able to provide them with content monthly. Start there, start small, but dream big about all that you can do with social media. So now we come to the moment that we've been waiting for. Up next, we have Jeremy West, who's the Nutrition Service Director for Well County, and he's going to be sharing his expertise with us. Jeremy and his team are known for how active they are with social media. He currently uses five different social media platforms. You can see their handles here if you'd like to check them out. If you have any questions for Jeremy, please type those in during his presentation, and we'll take as many as we can after the during the interview with Jeremy. I also wanted to point out that in 2016, Jeremy was the recipient of the most innovative award by the Food Management Magazine, and that award, which is a food service industry magazine, that award stemmed from his work to revamp his program to add more fresh fruits and vegetables, more scratch items, and more locally produce. Way to go Jeremy. So I'm going to turn it over to Jeremy. Now we're thrilled to have you, and I'll let you go from here. All right. Thanks, Ranie. I appreciate your overview that you've given us so far, and hope to add to that. It'll be a little bit of repeat, but mostly not. So I'm glad everyone could join us today. And certainly, social media is an area that I have grown in personally over the last couple of years. I was pretty much a novice, except for Facebook. And a lot of us are familiar with Facebook. That's a great entry point into social media. And also, a lot of districts really had tightened down social media. And so if you looked back in a lot of districts just a few years ago, they weren't really willing to let there be other departments that had social media accounts separate from the district communications. And so that's, we're really starting to see that change. And so I think we're going to continue to see more social media, not only by school, but also for different departments that operate within a district. And it's such a great tool. So there's our handles. So our handle is really just kind of the address. And each of them has a little different format there. You can see that Twitter and Pinterest always have that at sign before. And so we have really stuck with similar terminology for all of our handles. You can see that last one, Northridge Cafe. That's a coffee shop that we've opened. We've now added, I believe Snapchat and Instagram for our food truck. So we've continued to grow our social media presence. So on that next slide, we're just going to show you a few of the posts that have we've done over the years. Farm to Schools, it's one of those point of prides, point of pride for us, like we talked about earlier. And so that's something that we promote often. This one shows a partnership that we have with Denver Public Schools to process some zucchini from their farm and our food hub. Those went back to Denver and were cooked into muffins. And those muffins are actually served to the governor when he visited. And so there's always a great story to tell around Farm to School. And it's got a great community feel to it. Also, food art, we decided to invest in our some tools for our staff. So all of our kitchen staff have garnishing tools and we encourage food art Fridays and allow staff to just kind of take some of their extra fruits and vegetables and do something fun with that. And that's been really well received. The next slide, some of the outcomes that we've enjoyed from social media. You know, one time we had a local newspaper ran an article on us. We then posted that on our social media. And then that got picked up by a Denver news station, Channel 7, I believe. And so it's neat to see how it went from print to social media to now television. And so it really can and that can happen all in one day sometimes. It can move pretty quickly. Our most successful posts have been about either recipes or farm to school work. And so that's been nice to have that success. You saw another thing that happened recently is the last two years. So last year we started at Halloween, we bought some local pumpkins and asked our staff to carve those. And we had a little contest that we just wanted to do amongst our staff and in the district. And again, our local newspaper got wind of that. They put that in their newspaper. And so we had some great community buy in. Now this past year, Halloween again, we wanted to do the same thing. We were able to, we made a contact at the newspaper because of that first experience. They ran a nice color ad for us, free of charge, promoting the pumpkin carving contest and our online voting. And we had over 20,000 votes cast on a pumpkin carving contest that was happening in schools. So who knew that people would get excited about that? But I love the doors that social media has opened up not only with our local media but also with our community for to do fun things and also to be able to tell the story of what we're doing here in District 6. So I want to talk to you about some tips, some additional tips for using social media. First of all, make sure you have permission. I think we talked about that earlier, but make sure your district understands what you're going to do and that you have a plan for this and plan to monitor that and develop content. Really start by determining your audience and start small. You don't need to have four or five different formats of social media. If you don't have any currently, I would start with what you're most comfortable with. And for many adults, that's Facebook or Pinterest. And really determine who you're trying to reach. So your audience, you know, if you're trying to reach parents or your community, probably not Snapchat. I probably wouldn't start with that one. That's more of our students, really enjoy that format and adults if you're trying to reach parents with your messaging. You might want to choose Facebook or Twitter to go with that. So that's something that adults have embraced a little more. So certainly persons of all ages and all audiences will, there's a lot of intertwining in social media. So they end up in Instagram or on a tweet. May have originated from Facebook and vice versa. So there's a lot of, you know, crossing over. So don't stress about that too much, but really think about who your audience is. It really determines what you're going to post on that. So for example, in our district, I've also received student wellness. And so when we started the student wellness page, you know, we had to determine is this wellness for students is the messaging for parents so that they know we do it or is the messaging for students who we want to engage in the conversation. And so we decided it needed to be students that we wanted to engage in conversation about wellness. And so that's how we determine what gets posted on that format. So Twitter, great for celebrations. Today, this is my format. I oversee this for district six nutrition. I'm the head twit. We posted sushi. We have a brand new homemade in-house sushi that we were putting on our food truck today. They made it this morning. We snapped a photo of that and I tweeted it. And so that went out ahead of the food truck taken off. And so that's a great way for something that's happening right now or a celebration that's happened. And it's 140 characters. So you can't be long-winded with it. So it can't be a long story but can certainly link to other longer stories. Pinterest, the most pinned thing are recipes. And so this is such a great format to get our school recipes out there. And we oftentimes have parents or students ask us for a recipe of something that they ate at school. Of course, our recipes are written for 500. And so we scale that down and are able to post that through Pinterest. And so we think that's great for that. And also some of those how-tos if there's, how do you do this preparation method? That's a great place used for Pinterest. Facebook, really current events, more in-depth stories. Something we need a little more space to tell our story. Something that's geared more towards our parents, our community. We have found that to be a great tool. Instagram, it's really if you know, Instagram and Snapchat, they're kind of here now and gone in a few minutes. So you got to think about what are some uses for that. We like to use Instagram for special events or if we're wanting to recognize staff, we think it's a great way. Also if it's for our coffee shop or our food truck, it's a great way to just shoot out, hey, here's our special for the day or here's a coupon. Bring that to the food truck, show us your phone. So that's that Instagram and Snapchat are really great for those quick shout outs and really help to build customer base. So if you think about students and what they're used to, you know, adults, we all like our little, our little membership card. So if we buy 10 coffees, we get the 11th free. Well, students aren't as hip about that. And so, but they really like to have a following and know that they're part of something bigger. And so we use this to really build following after student focused programs. So continuing on on the next one here. For tips, social media can take over your life if you let it. So have a plan and that's kind of what this is next section is going to be about. Really assign those site administrations to several individuals. So we, we have a team, probably about four or five of us here that's on our admin team that we have really assigned administration. So for Pinterest, that's primarily my assistant director, Kara, who's our dietician. She really takes care of anything we're going to put on Pinterest. I take care of the Twitter format. I have my operations coordinator and some very supervisors to help with Facebook posts. And then we actually use people that are directly in the operation. So for our coffee shop, our barista has administrative rights to do Instagram and Snapchat and our food truck personnel have administrative rights to do that. So we've trained them for those that are outlying programs for us. So the coffee program that's in a high school, you know, we've asked that the only thing that they're approved to post is about their program. So it's here's a new drink we're offering. Here's a coupon. Here's our operating hour. So it's nothing other than that. Monitor your sites. You do have to pay attention to them. Don't be afraid for negative comments to come in. Those are going to happen. Now, if there's some nasty stuff or cuss words, we just, you know, those go away. We don't let those get posted up to our site. And you can certainly have parameters around each one of them as to whether things post instantly or if you have to bless those. And so work with your district. Generally, they will have some guidelines in place for that. And so we just make sure that we monitor that. In my district, we have a communications department. And so their person, one of the specialists in communication department, they help monitor all sites for the district. So they're really good to prompt us if there's something they feel like we should respond to that we haven't. You want to determine those frequency of postpins and tweets. This really helps grow your following. So for Twitter, if you're just planning to post once a month, that's probably not going to be a very successful format for you. And so Twitter's meant to be frequently updated. And so really, all of them are. But I would say more so things like Twitter and Instagram, Snapchat. Really, frequency is okay on those. Facebook, you know, I'm always conscious. I don't want to fill up somebody's Facebook news feed. And so one, two, three a week is usually about what we do. But we really plan for it. We're going to prepopulate those posts when possible. So for instance, National School Breakfast week is coming up in March. And so we have some information that maybe our School of Nutrition Association has provided. Sometimes when there's campaigns like that, they'll provide some of the verbiage that you want to use or they'll provide a logo. So we're going to go ahead and build those posts either just on a Word document or you can build them in some of the formats and put the date when you want it to post. So prepopulating that really helps, especially if it's a busy week. So we do some special promotions during National School Breakfast week and so our staff may get really busy. So we want to just take care of that ahead of time. Don't forget this. You got to get off your page. See what other people are doing. For Twitter is a great example. For me, I always try and keep. So it'll show on your statistics how many followers you have and how many you're following. So I always try to make sure that the number of people I'm following is at least 100 people more than who are following me because that's really going to build my own following. So I have about 350 followers on Twitter. That's and our Twitter accounts have been open less than two years. So may will kind of be the two-year anniversary. And but I'm following about 515 right now. And so I always try to be out there looking for other people that we can connect with. And looking around, there's some great things that happen on other people's pages that are about your industry or a great idea or something that's good for parents no matter what state they're in. And so doing those cross posts not only helps get good information out to your stakeholders but also can help get your post out to others. Boost posts strategically around school events. So you can pay to have that done. Facebook does a great job of boosting posts, for example. And so we think about what are some key things that we is just something we really want to boost. And so one time we did it around our hiring event. We were struggling to find enough staff and so we boosted that post about our hiring event. Other times it's about, you know, if we've had some special recognition or some student successes, we really want to boost that and get a bigger following. So use that strategically. It's not something you want to do all the time because it can be a little costly. But it's a good tool. Also include social media when planning your school events. So think about who's going to take the photos. Do you need media release forms? Some districts, if you want to post a picture of a student, they have to sign a form. Other districts like mine assume that everyone is free to have their photo taken unless they sign something that says they can't. And so anytime we're taking photos that include students, I'm going to check with my front office and show them the picture I want to post and they're going to tell me if any students should not have their picture posted. A lot of times we're just trying to shoot the back side of students. So if they're going through the salad bar line, I'm going to take a picture from the back. So it kind of shows the back of their head. But certainly you don't want all of your posts to be like that. So make sure you have those photo releases. Think about what story you're trying to tell. So and then take your picture to focus on that. So, you know, there's lots of great stories to tell in the cafeteria. But what are we here to tell this week? We're here to talk about our new local beef patty. And so we want to make sure that that's the focus of what we're taking a picture of and running our posts about. And know when the posts will occur. So just have a plan for that. And, you know, calendar it in if you need to. Sometimes I put that in my my little Outlook calendar to think about when do I want to do my next post? And I don't want to forget it. So I put it in there as just a reminder. And I want to just say, you know, use a hashtag when appropriate, especially if there's a hashtag for a national event. So when we get to National School Breakfast Week, we're going to use that hashtag that's been provided by the School Nutrition Association. Because when they're pulling that, later they're going to pull that hashtag up and they're going to look at everything that got posted under that hashtag. And sometimes they use those posts and feature that in their magazine or repost that. And so it's just a great way to keep that conversation going nationally. And take advantage of trends when appropriate. So one of our recent Facebook posts was the mannequin challenge. So we had our Central Production Kitchen staff and some others back there. And that's very popular right now. Planking was a few years ago. You've seen other different things that are kind of in the moment. So we did the mannequin challenge. So take advantage of those trends. And finally, I just want to say that on the next slide, that social media is really, it's just another tool in your toolbox. It's really there to help you tell your story to market your program. This is another example of our Food Art Fridays that some of our staff did. So, you know, people don't understand School Lunch. They may think they understand it, but they may understand it from 10 or 20 years ago. It has certainly changed in the last five or six years. So this is just a great tool to help tell that story. That's what I have, Rainie. Fabulous, Jeremy. Wow. So I know we've gone over a lot today. If you're feeling overwhelmed, all you have to do is just remember that social media is just another tool. But to dig into this a little bit deeper, I'm going to ask Jeremy some questions. Jeremy, are you ready for a few questions? I am. All right. So you sound like the resident expert and you're doing so much I'm just thinking about the food service director out there that just wants to get started. What would you recommend for just a place with someone who doesn't have, maybe it's just them and someone else, maybe like Shannon and your Ray, what would you recommend for where to begin with social media? Yeah, I think don't be afraid to involve others. For me, you know, social media wasn't something I've made a lot of time for in my life. I was, I'm that person that their personal Facebook page I check. You know, I usually check when my wife was looking at hers and I just look over her shoulder. So, you know, but I've made it become, you know, a bigger part of my professional life because I found value in that. And so if you have a small team, you know, don't be afraid to maybe find a parent volunteer, someone that you trust or to involve some students. Certainly in setting it up, students can be very helpful with that because they, you know, there may be a class that's about IT or technology of some kind that can be helpful to that. Because for me, it was about how do I set this up? How do I get all the reminders and all, you know, I didn't understand all of that. And so I found people that could help me with that. I don't feel like I'm an expert of social media, but I have, you know, I've learned to be functional in knowing what I need to do. And then when it's beyond that, I involve others that just have that expertise. But start small. If there's a particular format that you're comfortable with personally, then I would start with that format. So you brought up, Jeremy, that this has also helped kind of your district as a whole and you professionally. When we talked on the phone, you mentioned how it's enabled you to connect with a wider audience and to learn what others are doing. Could you just say a little bit more about that, how it's helped you? Yeah, I would say, you know, as I, a lot of times I attend conferences, you hear great ideas and you see dynamic speakers or connect with others in your industry and you hear about the great work they do. But then, you know, you're back on the plane and home and you've lost your business card and you can't, you know, it's hard to stay connected. And so what I have found is it's really, it's been a great thought starter for us. So I, you know, I'm looking through other school districts, any school district that I can find, I friend them, you know, I make them a follower or whatever the terminology is for the format because there's just such value in seeing what other districts are doing. We're not competing with each other. I can't feed your students in Nebraska and you can't feed mine in Colorado or even next door in the neighboring town. And so don't be afraid to get off your page, go look around. It's been helpful to make connections you know, across the industry and with industry people. I would say at first I was really, I didn't allow a lot of followers from the industry side onto my pages because my initial impression was why I don't want people to think that we're just sometimes you hear that school food is just embed with big business, you know, the big food corporations. I've since changed my stance about that. I have found that in the world of food service it really takes all of us. It takes community partners like Livewell, it takes operators, it takes our industry that provides food products that we can serve to our students. And so I think it's been great to help make connections in all those segments and with legislators. I follow some legislators as well so that they can see the work that we do. And maybe, you know, when it comes down to that time when they're having to make some tough decisions about funding or national nutrition standards and the state of that, they'll remember some of the things that they saw through Facebook and other formats that we've promoted it in. Those are great, those are great ideas, Jeremy. I love the idea you shared with me or something that you're already doing, having your delivery truck driver do some posting. Could you just tell us a little bit more about that? I just love the simplicity of it. Right. So we're, we actually just recently bought a camera. And so I think it's like a GoPro, but it's not one of those. So we're going to attach that to some like a delivery cart and see how that, and then, you know, film that. And it could be like several hours of film, but then we'll high speed it. So you can, you know, we want to tell the story about how we receive, you know, so here's some local food or fresh food coming in. We're going to see it being produced. We're going to see it put on a delivery cart, taken out to the kitchen and, and serve to a student. And so, you know, really the whole process is a mystery to people. They don't understand school food or they have a misunderstanding of school food. So anytime we can miss bust, we think that that's a great idea. That's great. And you mentioned to me that the millennials, you have a number of millennials that work for you and they're perfect for doing social media. So reaching out to younger people is another thing you mentioned as well. Exactly. And we, so far, food truck, we had some change in personnel there and we had one of our younger generation workers come on board and she was like, can we do some Instagram or something here? And we were like, yes, please do it. So we just provided some basic training and, but we didn't have to train the person on how to use the formats. I already used them personally. They were well versed in it. And so, you know, it just makes that process so much easier. So don't be afraid. And this is a good way for some of your younger generation workers to really take some ownership and show some leadership in an area. And again, you can control some of the administrative stuff from your side and just, you know, you may want to monitor that a little more closely at first until you have that trust and comfort with them. But after that, they can really be a huge asset. And they're really good at helping develop that following. They know how to do that and so that's been very helpful for our journey. Jeremy, it sounds like you're doing a lot of social media, but I also get the impression it's spread across a lot of people. So personally, just you, how much time do you think you spend on social media in the course of a week? Oh, well, let me think. I probably spend, I mean, it's usually pretty quick because I mostly focus my efforts on Twitter. It's usually I am somewhere and I see something that I want to tell story about. So I snap that picture and that picture is key, folks. So don't don't post pictures that are fuzzy or just you know, make sure you look at the background of the picture and make sure everything looks nice. So take some time. There's lots of filters on your phone that can make it look even better. So use those filters. So get a good picture and then, you know, I can get a post up and with a picture in like a minute. So I would say in an average week, you know, maybe one to two hours would be a busy week. I would say an average week is more like, you know, 30 to 45 minutes. And I would say collectively as my team, depending on, you know, some weeks are certainly busier than others, but I would say overall we probably spend as a leadership team, you know, maybe I would say two and a half hours at most between all the formats of putting that on there. So a lot of this is kind of, I'm sitting, you know, maybe I'm sitting at home in the evening and I'm looking at other people's pages and I'm reposting some of their stuff because I think it's, you know, it tells a cool story and something we want to promote in our district as well. So a lot of it's just kind of relax time or I'm eating my lunch and it's just a good time to catch up on that stuff. So can you speak to the ways in which social media is changing the way communities see school food? Well, I think it's starting to help us connect with the generation where we want to connect with the most and that's our students. This is how they communicate. They don't look at flyers anymore. So we can print flyers and posters all day long but those become a piece of furniture after the first couple of days. So no matter how colorful and how cool they look, that's not how our students communicate anymore. I mean, even in their own families, I have, you know, my kids will text me from the next room. So, you know, that's just how our students and honestly, a lot of our parents of those students, they communicate differently and a lot of them are more visual. We have a short attention span because there's so much information out there in the world right now all the different formats and ways that you can receive information. So really, you know, I think it has it's helped us redirect resources. So where we used to spend money on printing and things like that, we've reinvested that. So we buy those little cameras and we've bought this a little $50 kit that is kind of a little photo booth in a box so that when we want to take a picture of a plate of food, we can put it in there, put some lighting on it that makes it look it's best and it's on a nice plate and so we've just kind of reinvested in tools to help tell our story through social media. It sounds like you're having a lot of fun telling your story. Is there when you say tell your story to food service directors, can you tell us what you what you mean by that? So for us, I mean our tag line is nourishing students creating success you see on that logo and so that's really that's where it starts for us. It starts from that. How are we nourishing students? How are we helping them succeed in the classroom? Some of our cornerstone stuff for that for District 6, we had a unique opportunity with the dormant facility that we were able to reactivate into a central production kitchen. And so we're often talking about local foods or fresh foods or different formats with a food truck and coffee shop and other we have kind of a global cafe concept in our secondary. So we're trying to help promote that but also you know promote nutrition and promote wellness and that physical activity is part of it too. It's not just about what you eat but it's how much you move. And so you know and certainly anytime there's we like to be supportive of the district successes as well. So sometimes if you look through my Twitter feed you'll see here's here's an athlete that got honored or here's a choir that won an award. One of my recent tweets was I was at a high school that has they call them the green cap so it's like really central and they are all about how can we reduce waste and and be environmentally friendly and so they were selling refillable water bottles and so I took a picture with him and posted that just to support their cause. So really for us it's got to come back to the students how are we helping them be the most successful they can be. Jeremy thank you so much and thank you for telling us your story and I think the point is is that every district and every food service director has a story to tell and we hope that you will start telling your story using more social media tools and so thank you so much Jerry really Jeremy we really appreciate you being here. Here's just a quick recap on how to access the tool kits and the tool they're available at LiveWellColorado.org you click on Healthy Schools scroll down and click on the Live Well it's both with initiative then online resources enter your name and email which we won't share with anyone it's just for us to know who's visited the site and then scroll down and view and download the tools and here's what that will look like on the website. Finally we have the resources and links available here which we'll be sending out with you in conclusion after the conclusion of the webinar. Thank you for joining us today it's been great to have you with us we hope that you leave with tools resources and new ideas for promoting your program a special thank you to Colorado food service directors who provided these ideas to Jeremy who joined us today also to Charlie for setting us up thank you and all of our partners who shared their resources with us just a reminder that this webinar the tool kits and all the tools we mentioned to you are available on the LiveWell Colorado website and again we'll be sending those out and have a wonderful rest of your day.