The Publicity Hound’s Blog  

As a farm-raised kid who couldn’t wait to get off the farm…it seems to me that you have publicize the earning potential of a program graduate to show a prospective student that investing in a 4-year program would increase his or her earning potential enough to spend the extra money. Not many farm kids who are interested in agriculture are hard-wired to the idea of four-year degrees. So you need to show them that there are ways to apply their love of agriculture in ways other than traditional farming (been there, done that). Do your graduates pursue careers as food genetics researchers? Do they work on developing crops and other food sources for impoverished nations? Are they working in the landscape design (seems like an upscale profession for a farm kid who doesn’t want to farm)? Tree-farming or land conservation? Do you have 4-year grads who are farming more successfully than their parents because they got a university education? You might also pitch those stories to publications such as “The Country Today” or other ag magazines.

Once you locate and write those stories, I’d suggest getting them in front of the university’s alumni via alumni publications, so the parents in your audience understand the careers that are available to their children as graduates of your program.

You might have also a good prospect base among the members of the FFA. Have you considered tapping into the publications and resources there to spread the word about careers among ag-friendly high school students? They may also have publications for ag teachers, who influence those students.

Hope this helps!

Elaine,

As a movie buff, I was fascinated to learn in the movie “Sideways” that wine making was a study in the field of Horticulture. There are many wine makers in New England with more establishing themselves as winemakers every year. This field must be “booming” in other parts of the USA as well as other countries.

Perhaps if you provided more information as to the possibilities in the field of Horticulture people would pursue degrees in this area.

Given the enormous success of your football team and the millions of dollars in TV exposure it brings your school, I’d suggest you mount a popular petition campaign to rename your mascot after some good-for-you vegetable — like carrots, brussels sprouts or kidney beans. There’s no color commentator alive who could resist an extended discussion of why OSU changed it’s mascot. Of course, they’d have lots of fun with it. You’d have to learn to believe that playing the Ohio State Sprouts, or Beaners, or Niblets would put fear in your opponents hearts. (Over here in Wisconsin we still are learning that “Cheese Head” might be a positive thing…) But at least you could get rid of that ugly buckeye thing! (In all seriousness…good luck. A playful campaign like this just might help snag some attention to the issue and give you a chance to explain why it is important to us now and to future generatiuons!)

Start–and publicize–an internship program. I’m a graduate of Antioch College (now Antioch University),just 60 miles down the road from OSU. Antioch requires six to eight three-month internships in the field in order to graduate. The real-world experience its students get provides a huge leg up in the job market once they graduate.

Something quicker and easier while you’re getting that off the ground: partner with appropriate websites. Not that I get much traffic from it, but I happen to be the official recommended resume writer for HorticulturalJobs.com–could you become a recommended program (perhaps on a commission basis) for a few dozen relevant websites?

Set your Horticulture program apart from the pack by offering coaching. Create a horticulture program buzz that has students lining up all the way to Michigan because your students are coached through the program. Develop a list of all the possibilities one has with a degree in horticulture, creating excitement and curiosity with those students who might not otherwise consider it. By offering coaching as part as the program you will increase the success rate of the students and the possibilities that ly within the field of horticulture.

Perhaps there is a “green” environmental tie-in? I have a good friend who is a landscape architect and has a degree in horticulture. He says most landscape architects and/or the landscape companies people hire to landscape their yards, don’t have this degree and don’t understand the science behind plants. Here in Chicago, “the city in a garden,” there is a big push for environmental landscaping such as “green roofs” and efforts to transform former industrial sites into green areas. This might be an emerging occupation in the future and something you can tie into? Just a thought.

Set up one or more Google Alerts for keyword phrases that tie into your horticulture program. If you don’t know how to do this, Terry Brock provides instructions at http://tinyurl.com/c82rm

Once you know which bloggers are writing about these topics, you can post comments to their blogs, or pitch information that ties into your horticulture program. See “How to Pitch the Best Bloggers & Create a Publicity Explosion” at http://tinyurl.com/m7ymr