Resources for Locavore Program Planners

This document is a generic template for an organization to develop a locavore hunting or angling program and attract and persuade people in the locavores to participate in training and become hunters and/or angers. This plan will walk you through the process of planning your locavore outreach program and direct you to the resources available to implement it.

By adding the results of the exercises includes in the self-guided workshop at Locavore.Guide to this plan, it will become a custom plan for your state or any other audience you might serve. 

VALS segments US adults into eight distinct types—or mindsets—using a specific set of psychological traits and key demographics that drive consumer behavior. The US Framework, a graphic representation of VALS, illustrates the eight types and two critical concepts for understanding consumers: primary motivation and resources. The combination of motivations and resources determines how a person will express himself or herself in the marketplace as a consumer.

Learn to Hunt for Food is a successful Wisconsin program for novice adult hunters. Participants experience moral, ethical, sustainable hunting and have the opportunity to try it out themselves. Participants gain a broad understanding of hunting and conservation and will gain increased confidence in their knowledge of and skills needed to participate in hunting.

These documents summarize part of the research done in the development of the original Locavore.Guide website & workshop. The information could be very valuable in your efforts to understand locavores and build personas for your locavore program. 

This report presents the results of a quarterly online consumer panel survey that tracks hunter, angler and shooters’ media consumption preferences. The purpose of the Media Monitor is to measure use of outdoor media - namely magazine, television, and internet (social media) in the fishing, hunting and shooting communities and to match sportsmen’s purchasing preferences to specific media programs and titles.

Profound changes are occurring in the American public’s connections to nature, the outdoors, and wildlife. Participation in traditional nature-based recreation is stagnant or declining, Americans are spending more time indoors, and they are using electronic media more than ever before. At the same time, there is growing evidence that human health and well-being depend on beneficial contact with nature. To better understand and foster Americans’ relationship with nature, Dr. Stephen Kellert and DJ Case & Associates conducted an unprecedented study of nearly 12,000 adults, children and parents across the United States in 2015-16.

People interested in organic, whole and/or sustainable food are excellent candidates for locavore hunting/angling programs. These articles offer a better understanding of that market segment. 

Evaluation is key to any successful program. If you don't have objectives and a means of measuring if you've met them, how can you justify the investment in time and money that goes into starting and maintaining your program? This lesson lays out the basics of evaluation for a hunter/angler training program. 

It's much easier to get a potential hunter or angler to come to an event like a game tasting or a brief fishing class than it is to get them to sign up for a series of classes. This section outlines the process of finding partners and setting up events that will attract larger numbers of prospects to your locavore programs.  

Locavore.Guide is a self-guided workshop designed to help R3 (Recruiting, Retention, and Reactivation) professionals attract and train individuals interested in locally sourced food to become hunters and anglers.

The program will walk you through a series of brief video lessons and short exercises. At the end of the program, your exercises will be combined to become a locavore program for your organization.

Locavore.Guide is a self-guided workshop designed to help R3 (Recruiting, Retention, and Reactivation) professionals attract and train individuals interested in locally sourced food to become hunters and anglers.

The program will walk you through a series of brief video lessons and short exercises. At the end of the program, your exercises will be combined to become a locavore program for your organization.

The students in your locavore hunting and angling programs may not be the students you are used to in hunter education courses or other outreach programs. This lesson helps you better adapt your curriculum to various learning styles.

It's very likely that your current hunter education courses and even your hunter and angler training programs are designed for "traditional" hunters and anglers. That isn't necessarily the best approach for teaching new, adult hunters and anglers, especially those who are interested in the locavore movement. This lesson lays out some fairly easy and unobtrusive strategies for making your program more locavore friendly without alienating your traditional audience. 

You need to let potential students know that your program exists if you expect them to sign up. This lesson walks you through the process of determining the best media (and other locations) to promote your program to get it in front of hungry locavores. 

How do you develop ads, social media posts, press releases, and other messages that will encourage new adult hunters and anglers to sign up for your locavore program? This lesson explains marketing in a whole new, outdoorsy way that is sure to help you reach your audience. 

You've taken the Locavore.Guide workshop and done all the exercises, what's next?

Quite a bit of effort goes into developing a locavore hunting or fishing program, getting it approved, staffing it, and finally training new hunters and anglers. This lesson gives you the background you'll need to develop a program that your organization will approve. 

A great program in a city with no potential students can never succeed. This lesson teaches you the science of location selection so you can locate your program where the most likely participants live and work. 

You need to understand locavores and their motivations before you can develop a locavore program for your organization. This lesson gives you an understanding of locavores and the local food movement as well as several other audiences that might be likely to sign up for a food-motivated hunting or fishing class. The lesson also introduces the concept of personas and how you can use them to develop and market your program. 

Malcolm Shepherd Knowles (1913 – 1997) was an American adult educator. He is credited with being a fundamental influence in the development of the Humanist Learning Theory. These articles will give you a basic understanding of his work and how adults learn differently than children. 

Surveys from several pilot programs that you can borrow from for your own program. 

Personas are fictional characters, based on research representing the various user types of a product or service.  Personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations.

These documents contain a variety of sample personas that could be useful in developing your locavore program. 

Survey of Indiana Hunt Fish Eat graduates. The information here can be useful in helping you build a persona. 

Many regard millennials as vastly different from the previous generation. This modern tech-savvy Internet generation, or Gen Y, is often portrayed by various experts as collaborative, open-minded, job-hoppers, expressive, liberal, and receptive to new ideas. However, one can’t generalize the characteristics of an entire generation.

These notions about generational differences often form the basis for developing a learning strategy for any generation. However, this itself is the biggest myth. Despite the prevalent L&D belief in generation-specific learning preferences, the truth is that the basic expectations across generations are similar—variations are much less dramatic than we’ve been led to believe.

Tapestry Segmentation provides a detailed description of America's neighborhoods—U.S. residential areas are divided into 67 distinct segments based on their socioeconomic and demographic composition—and further classifies the segments into LifeMode and Urbanization groups. These documents contain detail profiles of types of people who have a tendency to be locavores. 

Using the Market Potential data, this document identifies the top locations for food oriented novice hunter or angler programs within each of the 50 states. Those detailed lists are provided at the end of the report. While we are able to provide estimated numbers of people who participate in activities favored by locavores, without individual-level data we cannot estimate numbers of people who participate in multiple activities or provide overall market estimates. 

The acronym VARK stands for Visual, Aural, Read/write, and Kinesthetic sensory modalities that are used for learning information. Fleming and Mills (1992) suggested four modalities that seemed to reflect the experiences of the students and teachers. Although there is some overlap between them they are defined as follows.