Communicate the data you’ve collected. Offers sample messaging, templates, and best practices using selected indicators and metrics. 

This unit explains how to create a communication plan based on the metrics you have identified as relevant and useful to your market. 

By now, you’ve put great effort into collecting information on your market, and have accumulated valuable data. So, what’s next? It’s time to turn your data into messages that will promote your market.

The messages you promote, the audiences you target, and the channels you use to distribute your messages form your communication goals. Maybe your market even has a written communication or outreach plan. These three elements work together to achieve your market’s goals by effectively communicating a specific message to the right people. 

Before you create a communication plan, you must first understand the organizational, operational, and communication objectives of your market. Clearly stating your objectives will help you choose which metric data that will have the greatest impact for your message. 

Organizational Mission: Overall goals, purpose, and intention of your market.

Operational Objectives: Short-term goals that drive your market to achieve its long-term goals and/or mission.

Communication Objectives: Goals for your market’s promotional efforts. 

Your market’s communication plan must closely align with its organizational and operational objectives. After determining these two sets of objectives, you can then begin to outline your communications objectives and how they will work to achieve your goals. 

Take a look at the following examples to see how these objectives work together:

Organizational Mission #1: Strengthen the local economy by supporting local farmers and small businesses.

*Sample metric data to consider for Mission #1: Estimated number of visitors, Market sales, Average distance in miles traveled from farmer to market, Agricultural acres owned, leased, or managed by market vendors, and Number of food education activities hosted.

Organizational Mission #2: Provide access to farm-fresh, affordable food to families in the community who need it most.

*Sample metric data to consider for Mission #2: Number of SNAP transactions, Average number of SNAP-eligible goods, Number of food education activities hosted

Organizational Mission #3: Provide a vibrant, educational space for communities to come together to socialize and learn about agriculture

*Sample metric data to consider for Mission #3: Estimated number of visitors, Market sales, Number of SNAP transactions, Average number of SNAP eligible goods, Number of food activities hosted

Now that you have set your objectives, the next step is to identify the audience you need to reach. Without a defined audience, your message will lack focus and fail to engage the right people. By identifying your target audience, you can tailor a message that speaks to the unique sets of motivations that drive their behavior and choices. Important: who you choose to target should correlate with your market’s objectives. 

Target Audience: The people you need to engage to achieve your goals. 

Segment Group: Subgroup of a broad target audience that share common interests, needs, and motivations. 

Let’s use Mission #1 from Step 1, increase customer foot-traffic and vendor sales, as an example. To achieve this mission, your target audience would likely include neighborhood residents in the area of your market. However, the target, “neighborhood residents” doesn’t fit into one, uniform mold. Rather, it is composed of people from diverse backgrounds and demographics, who have different needs and interests. For this reason, it is essential to further refine your target audience into segment groups. 

For instance, the priorities of parents with small children will differ from senior citizens living on limited means. The metrics you choose to highlight must be influenced by the priorities of your audience, as dictated by the goals of your market. Your job is to discover what those priorities are, and which metrics work best to appeal to those priorities. Important: Knowing what motivates your audience is vital to the success of your communications. 

The following examples show how your target audience can be broken down further into segment groups, as well as sample metrics that may appeal to those groups:

Target Audience: Neighborhood Residents

Target Audience: Community Leaders

Target Audience: Community Organizations

Guide 1 provides an excellent activity markets can use to identify target audiences. The activity asks participants to write down as many audiences their market targets on a regular basis on individual sticky notes. Participants are then asked to place them on a stakeholder spectrum graph, ranging from market promoters, individuals with a neutral opinion of the market, to market detractors. Participants should analyze the less populated areas of the graph and discuss how to expand their reach to untapped audiences.  

Now that you have both set your objectives and identified your audience, it’s time to break down your objectives into relevant messages for each audience. Also included in this guide are sample messages and Helpful Information bullet points you can use to support the metric data you choose to highlight. 

How you craft each message depends on what will motivate your audience to act. The key is first to determine what your audience finds important, then create a message that either supports those values, called the benefit exchange, or eliminates barriers that keep them from acting. Important: When creating a message about a program, event or campaign, appeal not to the needs of your market, but to the values of your audience.

Benefit Exchange: Why your audience should care and/or how they benefit.

Barriers: Perceptions or realities that keep your audience from the actions you want them to take.

It is also important to consider the audience when determining the appropriate tone of your message. Language geared toward your die-hard supporters and current funders may be more informal or conversational than language you would use to address local officials or potential funders. Remember, you must appeal to the values of your audience, and the tone of your language sets the stage for that appeal. But regardless of the tone or audience, your messaging should always be consistent and point back to the key mission(s) of your market. 

The table below shows how to outline a message for different audiences. You can then create a message using metric data that supports the key ideas you want to communicate.

All messages must end with a clear call to action or next step. A call to action can be direct (volunteer today, donate now, register) or more suggestive (learn more, tell a friend, share our info). 

Sample actions include:

Use the worksheet below to outline ideas and information to include in your message:

Audience #1:

Audience #2:

Once your goals, target audience, and message have been identified, it is time to determine how to distribute your message. Important: Channels used by your audience will vary by demographic and whether you seek to engage an individual or organization. Be sure to choose channels that engage your audience on a regular basis.

Some examples of channels are:

One-page annual reports have become popular with market organizations, and for good reason. The ability to show the impact of your market on one 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper allows for quick, impactful interactions, in addition to cutting down on printing costs. Markets are creating summary reports in a variety of ways that often include engaging graphics. When creating a one page impact report, remember to include basic information about the market and the market organization. The number of staff, type of incorporation, and mission of the market are good places to start, and provide some context for the viewer to better understand the data presented.  Tools such as Canva provide easy to use templates for such reports.  FMC provides an overview of many affordable tools for data visualization here.

Person-to-person communication, as defined as direct contact between persons, is often the best way to reach audiences that have limited interactions with print, broadcast, or online media. For example, if your audience includes senior citizens or children, you may want to pursue a partnership or establish a liaison with a senior center or school. Conveying your message in-person through a presentation or conversation is incredibly impactful, especially when coupled with a handout or flier.  Think outside of the box to identify possible in-person communications opportunities. If a local organization hosts regular volunteer days or events, offer to have a volunteer swap. For example, if an area school hosts a garden cleanup day once a month, offer to send a market representative to help on a regular basis. In addition to assisting with the garden cleanup activities the market representative would be able to inform other volunteers about the market and its events, as well as begin to form personal relationships with potential customers. 

It’s also important to remember the best way to reach your target is not always obvious and may require some research. Often, the methods you least expect to work earn the most attention. It may take some trial and error to discover which channels engage your audience. For this reason, a content calendar is crucial to your communication plan. It may take a few weeks or even months, but over time, the feedback and data you record will demonstrate which channels work best to promote your message. Once you have enough data to illustrate a distribution pattern that works, you can further refine your communication plan. 

Always think strategically about your communications to ensure you have enough capacity, supply, and resources to meet your audience’s expectations. 

The bottom line for your communication plan is, of course, to build a relationship with your audience. A key ingredient to any relationship is trust. Therefore, it’s critical to be aware of how successful communications could negatively affect your market and dissolve the trust you worked hard to establish.  

Take this scenario: Your market spreads the word to your social media followers about the first strawberries of the season: “First strawberries of the season are here at market today. Stop by and pick up a pint or two or three!” This generates interest and entices your followers to market with the promise of this highly anticipated item. Additionally, it implies your market has an abundance of strawberries. However, the one vendor selling strawberries actually has a limited supply and sells out early, leaving many customers disappointed upon arrival. 

To avoid this mishap, the post could have been phrased more appropriately: “First strawberries of the season are here at market today. Supply is limited, so get here early!” 

To create a strong and effective communication plan, it is very important to keep a record of who, what, when, where and how you target your message. A content calendar is a tool you can use to help plan a strategy for message dissemination, and track the efficacy of each message and channel.

This section provides a sample content calendar and a content calendar template you can use to guide development of your communication plan. Use the content calendar template to organize your plan by recording who, what, when, and how you distribute your message, and to note feedback or responses you receive. However, this template is only one example of how you can record and organize your plan. You can customize the information you hope to learn by adding, subtracting, or modifying the rows and columns as you see fit. 

Content calendars come in various forms depending on your need. Simply typing the keywords “content calendar” into an online search engine, such as Google, results in an assortment of free, pre-made calendars. You may also choose to use an online content calendar as a way to easily share, edit, and view with multiple people.

Take a look at the recorded data in the sample content calendar. In this example, it appears Facebook may do a better job than Twitter or Instagram to engage followers with the message. It also looks like a direct email to potential stakeholders and handouts to neighboring businesses solicited more engagement than a press release. After a few weeks of recording a similar or varied data pattern, you will begin to better understand which channels work for your message. 

However, it is important to remember that “likes”, clicks, and responses are not the only ways to evaluate the success of the channels you use. If your goal is to increase vendor sales at your market, a spike in sales may be evidence to show your communication efforts are working. Only through continued evaluation, and analysis of the data in your content calendar will you uncover the best distribution strategy for your message. 

Figure 1. Example of Basic Content Calendar

Over time, the communication data you track will likely shift. You will know your communications are working if it supports your market’s organizational and operational objectives. If you have several objectives, it may be helpful to put them in order of priority. This in turn will help you identify and collect metrics relevant for tracking progress effectively.

This section presents sample messages, media templates, and best practices for using selected metrics. Use the sample messages as a starting point. They should be customized to reflect your market’s data, goals and mission. When sharing information on your market, follow this important rule: “Write once and publish often.” This strategy encourages distribution of the same content over multiple forms of media. Market data should be used as often as possible, even in email signatures and website home pages. 

The sample messages shared here can be particularly helpful when creating promotional materials for events like National Farmers Market Week and annual giving campaigns. 

The following is a template for creating a press release on farmers market impacts. Press releases should be created regularly, whenever there is news to share with the general public.