L.ADP.2101 | Productivity & Profitability Webinar Series for Red Meat Producers 2020-2022

Summary

The Productivity & Profitability Webinar Series was run following successful past projects of the same name. This project was delivered by Aggregate Consulting (formerly Holmes Sackett) over a two-year period, with a total of 42 webinars held with a live audience and recordings made available online.

This project was an awareness raising activity, providing timely and topical technical information relevant to sheep and beef producers across southern Australia. The outcome of this project is that 33% of webinar attendees indicated an intent to implement a practice change in their business.

Objectives

The project objectives were:

• 40 webinars delivered to Australian red meat producers delivering fundamental
  information to support practice change and increase productivity and profitability with
  an average satisfaction rating of 7/10 or above.
• Pilot a Q and A panel session to allow webinar participants to ask questions to
  presenters in a standalone webinar.
• A phone survey of 100 MLA webinar participants that indicated they would implement a practice change from the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 webinar series that:
  a. determines the level of practice change due to webinar attendance
  b. determines type of practice changes that are occurring and relate that to intended
  practice change
  c. assesses why they have not implemented a practice change when they indicated
  they would
  d. assesses attendance to other MLA activities (LTEM, MeatUp, BWFW, BeefUp, PGS,
  Business Edge, PDS, MMfS)
  e. canvasses what they would like covered in future webinars.
• Survey report compiled that:
  a. illustrates and interprets outcomes
  b. provides recommendations on current and future webinar program investment.

Key findings

The average attendance for webinars was 120 people per webinar with 81% of the webinar attendees being primary producers.
• The satisfaction and value ratings are averaging 8.4 and 7.8 out of 10 respectively, with 88% of attendees recommending the webinar series to other producers.
• 33% of attendees intended make a practice change as a consequence of attending a webinar. Of these producers, 75% went on to successfully execute a practice change as a direct result of a webinar.
• A key learning for industry is the value in continuing to explore different methods of engagement for different producer audiences. This should include mechanisms to evaluate the success of current RD&E pathways to influence practice change at a production level. This project demonstrates that allowing producers a feedback mechanism to influence future content sustains engagement.

Benefits to industry

The project has demonstrated that an effective webinar program can provide cost-effective engagement with a wide range of producers across different geographic regions. The program has also shown concise and targeted communication can result in practice change and further action being taken to build knowledge and capacity.

MLA action

MLA has used the learnings from this project to inform a tender request to deliver a future project incorporating both webinars and podcasts under a cost-share model.

Future research

Given the number of webinar attendees who have identified they will access recordings in the future, combined with their preference for online sources of information, it would be advisable to monitor MLA website traffic to quantify the legacy value of this project.

How to capture meaningful producer feedback remains a challenge to overcome. It appears producers have been saturated with survey requests and now suffer what is being described as 'survey fatigue'.