 county agent checked off 13 visitors 14 phone calls I wonder how I could reach more people I know I'll call Dan or Dina they're the extension rock stars hey Dan this is Sonia how are you good I'm wondering you had talked about the extensions ask an expert yes can you tell me how that might help me reach more people in my county hi Sonia sure I can ask a few questions answer a few questions about that ask an expert widget yeah it was really easy to set up and no it's not really overwhelming I get probably a one a month off of it and a lot of times those individuals that ask a question through that become a permanent clientele for me calling direct or answering through emails I like getting that first contact that way through the email and the ask an expert situation because then I have time to research the answer and really make it look good yes I think even once a month is worth my time because just like any question I wouldn't blow off a client if they called or stopped into the office and if I can add one new individual client to our office that becomes a regular user once a month I think it's worthwhile it's surprising how often I get questions that the original post was in the middle of the night over a weekend it gives them 24-7 access to our office and yet in such a way that it is convenient time-wise for me or our other staff to answer and I've never had anyone repeat and use that system on a regular basis more often they become clients who call direct or email or stop in the office here's how you can add an ask an expert widget on your website first you need to start off at ask.extension.org you should have a login as a NDSU extension employee log in to ask.extension.org and go in your profile area you can click on my groups and see what groups that you're assigned to only the groups that you're assigned to can you create a widget for in my case I belong to groups such as computer literacy and NDSU web technology I wouldn't be able to go out and make a widget for poultry for instance because I don't belong to that group but let's say I wanted to make a widget for computer literacy what I can do is click on that and go to settings and here's the option to for ask form and widget this will generate some code that we can put on to our web page in egg CMS so I've clicked on that option you can customize it as much as you want I think the default values don't include photo upload option location if that's important to you and so forth so I'm just going to choose a couple options here I'm going to save changes based on what I had checked at the bottom of the page you're going to see some code here it's called I frame code and I am going to copy that over then I'm going to head over to my website in this case egg communication and where are we going to put that widget on our site typically goes in a static text portlet so to do that be logged into your eggs CMS page click on manage portlets choose the option for static text portlet that gives you a lot of flexibility on what you can put there I'm going to give it a title for the portlets and now where do we post that code in well since that is HTML code we want to not just post it into the visual editor here where we're usually used to posting information but we're going to go over to this HTML button here and here's where we'll paste in that code that we saw from the ask an expert site we're going to hit update and give it just a second here and you'll see that this is what the widget will look like on your website so in this case we of course allow for a space to ask the question and here I also gave them the option if I wanted to share my question on ask an expert so what does this look like we can see what it looks like there but in the portlet we can go over and take a look at it once my page refreshes and here's where you can see that the widget is now on your site so yes this is a technology widget on the egg communication site however you can customize it based on the group that you are in for instance if you're in renville county you'll join the renville county group on ask an expert get the code and then put it on your renville county website and what happens is the public can come to your website they can post a question in here and it'll go right to the people assigned to that group through ask an expert making it very local if you need any help with setting up a widget on your website please contact a communication