Digital Onboarding - Level II

A “how to” document describing how we use communication tools to keep people working on the farm up to date on what’s going on. An experienced farm hand should help you log in to each tool and walk you through the basic operations. 

How we use Slack - how to follow along with the everyday nitty-gritty?

We use our Slack channel for “walkie-talkie” information around the farm. It’s a “must have” if you are an intern or fellow farmer or spending a lot of time on the farm. 

Every functional area has its own channel, so you can choose to follow the channels that you are interested in for “as it happens” information. We generally expect that if you are an intern working in a functional area, you will monitor the channel. This is where, for example, goat walkers and goat catchers coordinate. It’s also a great place to share observations, questions or concerns particular to a functional area. In this sense, it also serves as a logbook. If you think a post is relevant to the logbook, tag it with :log: 

In addition to the functional areas, we have an announcements channel, a proposals channel, and a “random fun” and “wishlist” channels. Announcements should be relevant and timely to everyone on the farm. 

Some specific protocols include:

• We use threads when responding to a message to keep things tidy.

  • If the discussion gets to a conclusion that should be more widely shared, use "share to channel"

• Include @individual or @everyone to let people know who the message is intended

• If it's process oriented, then add :process: so it's tagged to make sure it's documented and can be mentioned at huddle

  • everyone should thumbs up when they see a :process: post

• ❓ (:question:) requires an answer - even if the answer is "I don't know"

• Use "announcements" to post links to meeting notes or decisions that people should know about

We frequently review our Slack channel for things to post to our Social Media channels. If you think your post, tag it with :buffer: to make it easier for us to find. 

Click here to join our Slack channels and get a walk-through of the channels and how to post messages. Make sure to cover threads and tags. 

How we use Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, TikTok) to promote our offerings and generate involvement with the Lifeboat Academy

Our main goals are:

1. “Bums in seats” - sign-ups for webinars, circles and sessions

2. Generating income for the LA

3. Providing ongoing support for Lifeboat Builders

4. Growing connections/relationships by maintaining a social media presence and sharing content that is interesting, inspiring and useful.

5. Connecting with potential shareholders, farmers/interns, funders, fellow community members.

We accomplish all of this by increasing our advertising reach and consistency, offering ample opportunities for folks to pay-it-forward, and making our offerings and information easily available.

Where does content come from? - We have created a shared folder to hold a reservoir of content that can be shared on the various platforms. Everyone is encouraged to share photos, videos, articles, memes, and quotes directly to the folder to help generate content. This means that we will have a reservoir of content that we can pull from when setting up weekly posts. Visitors are also encouraged to share any photos or videos they take while they are here!

TikTok - We can use TikTok’s built-in video editor to create video content that is engaging and shareable across other platforms. We can use hashtags and play into the algorithm to potentially reach a lot of people without spending any money (compared to FB ads, for example). 

Facebook - We use Buffer to automate Facebook posts on our page, “The Lifeboat Academy” about ongoing events, newsletter snippets, work parties, and more. We can start using paid Facebook ads to generate more reach and more email-sign ups that will hopefully convert to event sign-ups. We can also post Medium articles, photos, and memes that we generate, as well as share videos from TikTok as reels.

    We also have a Facebook group, “Lifeboat Builders,” where we post about our upcoming Lifeboat offerings and where folks have the space to ask questions and get support. Anyone considering or in the process of building a lifeboat is welcome to join the Facebook group.

Instagram - We can set up our TikTok account to automatically post reels on Instagram. We use hashtags on all our posts to drive more people to our content (e.g. #sustainability, #permaculture, #regenerativeliving). In terms of using hashtags, you can look at previous IG posts to see which ones we’ve used, and add any that you feel are relevant depending on the post. Memes, photos, and videos are all great for IG.

Mastodon - Mastodon is a new alternative social media platform that we have just started using. From what I (Ronnie) can tell so far, it’s pretty similar to Facebook and is a place to post photos, videos, articles, whatever we are posting elsewhere. It has the benefit of being generally a more progressive platform, with more of a concentration of folks who are interested in divesting from mainstream capitalist platforms, have more climate consciousness, etc. I suggest that we post on there pretty much everything we are posting elsewhere, and I also think it will take some time to generate a following because the platform is much newer and has fewer than 200K people on it so far. 

HelpDesk - The hub for all things “lifeboat,” where people can access:

• Materials related to the formation of the Lifeboat Academy (vision, farm plan, business plan, etc) and opportunity to provide feedback on materials.

• How to get involved - join a guild, become an investor, become a farmer-caretaker, etc

• DIY Lifeboat how-tos, articles, FAQs

• Articles related to resilience skills

The HelpDesk is a resource that we can point people to for both accessing resources and contacting us for support, for any reason. Managing our social media presence includes responding to HelpDesk tickets - support requests - in a timely manner and making sure that necessary resources are available in the appropriate categories. If someone asks a question that we provide an answer to, we can use the HelpDesk to make that information available to other people in an FAQ section.

What do we post?

We aim to post a daily meme to our Facebook (page and group), Instagram and Mastodon accounts. (Instructions to create a meme are in Digital Onboarding 1.) We post weekly to these platforms to advertise our ongoing Lifeboat events. We are planning to start posting a weekly video to TikTok that can also be shared on all the other accounts.

We usually post the same information (sometimes in a slightly different format) to all three places, using our Buffer account, so that people can follow on the channel of their choice and still be in the loop.

Ask the Admin caretaker for the login and password to access the social media accounts and get a walkthrough on how it works. Make sure you cover 

• how to create a post (with hashtags),

• select the right channels, 

• edit posts for each, and 

• schedule the posts.
  

Apprentice Tasks

• Make 5 memes for the following week and add them to Memes (ready) - see How to create a meme (Sunday)

• Schedule posts for upcoming events & event reminders on social media - see How to promote events(Monday)

• Use Buffer to post these to our Facebook page and group, Instagram, and Mastodon.

• Check the HelpDesk for any new tickets and assign them to appropriate peers (daily)

How we use MailChimp / newsletters - how to get the gist every once in a while?

We currently produce a farm newsletter every 2 weeks. As our plans evolve, we are hoping to beef up our newsletters a bit with more content that would be helpful to people who are trying to build their own lifeboats. 

Ask the Friends of Highgrove caretaker to show you how to log into MailChimp and “replicate a campaign” and edit it. 

What is Asana and why should I care?

We use Asana as our task management system. We use it for everything from our high-level Road Map, to our nitty-gritty daily planning in Huddle. 

Ask an experienced farm hand to send you an invite to the Highgrove Farm team and make sure you are added to any appropriate projects.

The most important projects are:

The Sprint Board.

The Tension and Idea Hopper.

The Spalding Valley Farm Road Map.

Agendas / How-to’s for the Sprint Plan and Huddle are included at the top of the Sprint Board project. Similarly, the agenda / how-to for the Hive Mind meeting is included in the Tension and Idea Hopper. 

Note: You aren’t required to use Asana. Everything in Asana should be mentioned during our regular meetings, so you can interface with Asana through a real-person during regular meetings.  

How we use Google Drive 

We currently use Google Drive for our online files. All of the most important files and folders can be accessed through the Lifeboat Academy Manual TOC and Spalding Valley Book of the Farm TOC. These are your best starting point if you are looking for something general. 

The main drive is divided into three folders - Farm / Lifeboat Academy / Stewardship Council.

Each functional area specific to the farm has its own folder under Farm. Similarly, the guilds associated with the Lifeboat Academy each have their own folder within that folder. Each functional area folder should include its driver statement and that driver statement should function like a table of contents for the functional area - that is, it should provide an overview to the file structure for the area and links to the most important documents. 

What if I want to go deeper?

If you would like to go deeper, check out Digital Onboarding - Level 3