What CRC has been up to?
During 2022, the CRC launched its Follow the Water – Connect the Drops website and social media channels. Please visit the site and ask your organization to follow our social media channels! Would you consider adding the Follow the Water weblink to your organization’s website as this helps boost our google search results for people looking for water information on the internet.
Do you have content ideas with Statewide appeal?
We would like to hear from our partners with regard to what type of content should be featured on our website. We will be working with our consultant to add pages over time. We will be adding a Lawn Campaign page to our website soon that features the commercials we created to advertise the videos. Contact any steering committee member.
Have you considered writing a blog post for Follow the Water?
Consider writing a blog on a water/nature topic you are passionate about that will transcend a specific location and also be relatable to other places or work in Oregon and southwest WA or focus on a specific behavior that someone could consider adopting to protect water. We are also looking for diverse voices to write blogs about nature, water, outdoors from their perspective. If you know of a potential author, please refer them to us.
Listen to our first radio interview!
We are excited to share that our social media attracted the attention of KXCR Florence Community Radio host Dina Pavlik “Beyond Your Front Door” for an interview. Keri Handaly and Eric Lambert give a thoughtful interview on “Healing Our Relationship with Water – Follow the Water” available on soundcloud.
Social Media Analysis
Over this past year, our consultant, Parachute Strategies, has purchased google ads and Facebook ads for the Whats Your Lawn Style (WYLS) (healthy lawn tips) campaign with our partner OSU Extension. It is hosted on a Master Gardener page and includes a tips page & videos in Spanish. Please share with community organizations in your area who work with Spanish speaking people.
We’ve purchased some ads for the Follow the Water videos (FTW) which are being featured in the April Hollywood Theater (Portland) Ecofilm festival. Please share these videos on your feed to help us reach more people!
Future ad buys for FTW and WYLS will be purchased by city geographic areas so that we can monitor how many people we are attracting from specific regions—as opposed to “5,000 visits from Oregon and 2,000 visits from Washington”, for example.
Lawn Care
The lawn campaign will continue in 2023 and 2024 in part with EPA grant funding. We just hired a behavior change firm called Marketing for Change to assist with the Lawn Care Pilots that will take place in Clackamas, Eugene, and Salem. We are also partnering with Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides and Metro to launch a Latine/Hispanic Landscaper outreach, training, and video pilot project. Each of these projects will result in a final report of what happened, successes and future recommendations for launching in other communities. We hope to hear from you with regard to your interest in delivering either residential lawn care program and/or small landscaper firm project in your community in the future. Also of note: the Solve Pest Problems website—an Oregon IPM project project managed by Weston Miller at OSU has launched. Please share with your community. If you have content recommendations or comments about the website—the site manager is now chris.hedstrom@oregonstate.edu, as Weston has taken a new job with Portland Parks.
Art as a Communication Tool
A variety of steering committee members presented on ways to link art to stormwater and nature programming. Springfield, Gresham, and Eugene are just a few communities that have hosted storm drain painting. Nate shared his plant-based mandala art.
The Pdx Metro Area “The River Starts Here” and the Vancouver-Metro area group, SW Stormwater Partners, created a 6-12th grade student video contest. Contact a steering committee member for resources if you want to do this in your community.Lastly, this year, a 20 year project called Honoring Our Rivers has been re-launched by Clearing Magazine. It is being promoted by Follow the Water and the Stormwater Partners because it is open to Oregon and southwest WA. Please share with your community teachers. Submission Deadline April 28th.
Logic Model
Katie Meckes and Roy Iwai have worked with CRC folks to create a logic model for focusing and measuring our work over time.
Clean Rivers Coalition 