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Showing Your Work

January 13, 2022News, PR/Marketing, Professional Development, The ByLine
Showing Your Work

By Rachel Peabody, ACN Association Comms SIG Co-Chair

I was always a lousy math student, but I do recall one really important lesson from the classroom: show your work.

The process of writing down your steps and showing the proof of your answer from start to finish is its own type of satisfaction. It’s documenting the what, the why and the how – and that’s something this communications major could always understand.

As an association communicator, it’s important not to downplay the importance of showing your work to your membership base. At a soybean checkoff organization, we like to call that “farmer sellback,” and it’s a critically important communications bucket that often gets overlooked. 

We tend to think first about all of the good we are doing for our audiences and their markets, and we promote our ag products to our outside audiences well – like global buyers, consumer and legislators to name a few. At the Illinois Soybean Association, we are rewiring our communications brains to also think about the farmer who pays into our checkoff, and communicating to them the value of the work their investments are doing on their behalf. Articulating our successes and telling stories of our accomplishments is not being prideful or boasting: we’re showing our work.

In 2022, Illinois farmers will start seeing our producer sellback campaign in various forms. Our “Checkoff that Pays Off” messaging will demonstrate to farmers the ROI they see from their checkoff investments. We will show data-informed impacts that are hard to ignore. Soybean farmers pay into the checkoff one half of one percent of the price/bushel they sell, and we’ll show what that means when applied to advancements in biodiesel, animal agriculture, carbon sequestration and more.

It stands to reason that the more a farmer knows about their checkoff investments, the more likely they are to support the checkoff. In the case of the soybean checkoff, historical research has shown that when farmers can name three specific programs that are funded, their support levels are well over 90 percent. That’s an approval rating we hope to reach with our Illinois soybean farmer base.

I’ll invite you to follow along on our farmer sellback and “Checkoff that Pays Off” journey this year by keeping up with us here: www.ilsoy.org.

Rachel Peabody is the Director of Communications for the Illinois Soybean Association.

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