ANREP Professional and Leadership Development Committee Wrap Up A Successful 2025 Webinar Series
By Holly Campbell, Chair
ANREP Professional Development Committee
The ANREP Professional and Leadership Development Committee was honored to deliver ANREP members and other natural resource professionals an informative and timely webinar series over 2025, promoting Extension’s important role in natural resource education. The series theme, Reaching Your Target Audience & Providing Innovative Programs, consisted of 12 30-minute webinars provided over the spring and fall. This theme and the mini webinar format were developed in response to a 2023 ANREP member needs assessment, which emphasized an interest in learning contemporary tools and techniques for enhancing media communication, delivering novel programs, and shorter mini webinars. During each webinar, one lucky recipient was awarded a door prize, usually a book recommended by the speaker on the webinar topic covered. Topics covered included successful tips for writing online articles, making short videos and podcasts, working with local media (radio, TV, and newspaper) and developing key messaging, running a webinar series, using social media, capturing impact, and more.
Using the Forestry Webinar Portal, 610 participants from across the U.S. and Canada joined the live webinars, while 451 additional participants listened to the recorded version for a total of 1,061 participants. Since the webinar portal markets to approximately 20,000 newsletter members from numerous natural resource professions and on a variety of subjects, each webinar reached an assortment of participants by job function. Webinar series participant job functions included local, state, and federal employees, foresters, academics (instructors, students, other educators), landowners, Extension professionals, and more. 16% of the audience across all webinars included Extension professionals, while 19% constituted an “academic” audience, and 34% included government employees (local, state, and federal).
Since each webinar provided an overview of ANREP, the association and Extension’s role in natural resource education was promoted broadly across a variety of disciplines. Some participant feedback included:
“Important and helpful information that our industry absolutely needs, we're out in the woods a lot and forget the importance of communication with other humans!”
“Lots of good useful advice on working with local media; but valuable for communicating technical info to any non-technical audience in different situations. And the presenter "walks the talk" - very good at presenting the information in the webinar.”
“Very informative program from a down-to-earth speaker with knowledge and insight on how to vet, organize and present a good story for viewers who seek good story content and tips about a particular subject of interest.”
You can still listen to the webinars here.
