Top Tips: What we learned from hosting by the Idaho FFA Association

The Idaho FFA Association hosted the #TeachAgChat on Thursday, March 10 and we'd love to share a few tips:

#1- Use the manual created by Dr. Foster and his students! We followed the "to-do" list in the manual in preparation for the chat. We utilized Canva- one of the sites suggested in the manual, to create a promotional graphic with the questions.

#2- Speaking of graphics, after analyzing Twitter data on posts with and without a graphic, we can difinitively say that the tweet with a graphic reached many more people. Our first tweet, posted March 5 without a graphic, made 492 impressions and had 13 total engagements. The next day, we posted a very similar tweet but added the graphic. This tweet made 7,974 impressions and had 360 total engagements. Graphics work!

#3- Send personal invites to colleagues, related Twitter accounts, and other organizations. In our case, we tagged all the state FFA associations we could find on Twitter in invitation tweets. We also sent direct messages to National FFA staff members involved in service learning. We also used our state ag teacher listserv and the national ag teacher listserv to promote, promote, promote.

#4- Don't try to tweet from two different Twitter accounts! Jaysa Fillmore, Idaho FFA Service Development Coordinator, was trying to participate from her personal account, @MrsAgTeacher, and the @IdahoFFA account. It would be been much easier to schedule responses to the questions from one account and then use the other live. It was also helpful to use Tweetdeck during the chat.

We were excited to claim the title of the first state FFA association to host a #TeachAgChat and would encourage other states to jump on board! Dr. Foster and his #TeachAg crew have done a great job creating this awesome resource for ag teachers- past, present, and future! Thanks for the opportunity!