Overview

4-H is a youth development organization which encourages young people to be engaged within their communities and helps them pursue their academic and career interests. This project is aiming for sharing 4-H’s success stories of youth becoming their best selves, celebrate its successes to a wider audience, and communicate 4-H’s impact.

Student Team

Producer: Betsabe Bajana

Background Information

Project Statement

4-H’s biggest concern is that many people believe 4-H is solely a program that teaches agricultural skills or that it is part of the Future Farmers of America (FFA). However, 4-H has a wide variety of programs that extend beyond agriculture and food events, such as robotics, career exploration, and teen leadership programs. Our goal is to showcase these different programs and rebrand the image that 4-H carries through the art of storytelling.

Design Challenge

Although 4-H has a wide variety of programs all over New York State, people have either never heard of 4-H or have misconceptions about what the organization is about. Therefore, 4-H’s main goals are:

1. Rebrand in order to clear up any misconceptions about the program
2. Reach a wider audience

Design Process

We use IDEO Human-Centered Design process as our design thinking process, including

1. Hear: gathering pain points with user research
2. Create: coming up with practical solutions
3. Deliver: high-fidelity prototyping

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Hear

From two interviews we conducted with our clients in the first 4 weeks, we’ve found that:

• Highlight the amazing story of students (2016 to 2020) and educators in the 4H program, show their abilities
• Highlight stories using the Thrive Model
• Focus on storytelling and getting the voices of the kids out
• Rebrand to include a more diverse group of students
• Focus on the general audience and give them more information about the programs run by 4H

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How might we help 4-H rebrand 4-H’s image and give them a wider audience?

Create

To help achieve 4-H goals, our group holds a brainstorming session on transmediating their written success stories into other mediums.

For our Ideate phase, we focused on redesigning the aesthetics of the success stories into more visually appealing media that makes reading success stories easier and more fun. We began brainstorming different types of media that these success stories could be. We considered creating videos, posters, comics, PechaKuchas, and social media posts (e.g. instagram reels, TikToks, etc).

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Final Deliverables

Considering that we need to find the most efficient, easy to create, low cost, and visually attractive ways to reach a wider audience for 4H, we voted and decided to only focus on three formats: posters, comics, and PechaKucha. We’re going to create templates focussing on these three mediums for direct use.

High-Fidelity Prototypes

Deliver

1. Posters

Two of our posters focused on a topic outside of agriculture, career explorations & STEM, to show activities in other areas 4-H hosts. Conceptually, we wanted the posters to communicate what the 4-H students learned and gained from the event, what 4-H means and our readers should know about 4-H, and why the program was valuable. Aesthetically, we wanted friendly green and white colors and easy readability without too much text. Technically, the posters were made using Canva. In terms of UX Information Architecture, the poster is visually appealing. The image is the central focus and sits at the top of the visual hierarchy.

After showing our poster prototype to our partner, they also expressed interest for a poster template that they could use on their own stories, so we took two of our posters and made templates for each.

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2. Comics

The comics are meant to illustrate the two worlds that 4-H has to navigate through. First, we transformed one of the success stories into a new comic layout. The new aesthetic makes the success story more engaging, dynamic, and readable. The colorful aesthetic and images catches the attention of readers and draws them into the story. Experimenting with this new format of storytelling could potentially draw more attention to the success stories of 4-H. By making these stories more engaging, 4-H can reach a wider audience of youth and, potentially, legislators, donors, and volunteers.

The second comic is what our team believes to be 4-H’s own success story, or their dream. The story illustrates how their success will benefit 4-H in the long run. Through rebranding, 4-H will get more recognition for all the work they do to help youth thrive in a way that best suits their needs. This recognition may lead to more funding and recruitment for volunteers. When people realize that 4-H does more than agriculture, people will become interested in helping 4-H and introducing more programs that will help youth long-term.

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3. PechaKucha

The PechaKucha is a short video that narrates the story of a volunteering success story in a rural area. It was originally created and recorded using PowerPoint, but after we learned that 4-H was partnering with Canva, we then recreated it on that platform. The UX analysis of the PechaKucha differs greatly from the other, more static, deliverables we have created. In terms of UX experience design, the PechaKucha combines both audio and video to narrate the success story. This sticks with viewers because the experience is more engaging. Just like the poster, the UX information Architecture makes the images the center of attention. However, unlike the poster, there is no other text to read and, instead, the narrator drives the experience of the story. This makes the UX Information Design rather simple; the look and feel of the video is informational. The purpose is to inform viewers of the success story without distracting text or background music. The focus is the images and plot.

Next Steps & Expectations

Since we had neither the time nor resources to conduct our Test phase, we would like to finish conducting user testing as one of our next steps. If possible, we would have interviews with 4-H staff members to ask them for feedback on our templates and How-To guides. We would also ask community members, parents, and 4-H youth about our chosen formats (comic, PechaKucha, and posters) to see which format was the most effective. We want to know which format is best at teaching people about 4-H (and potentially clearing up misconceptions), which format is the best at drawing attention to users’ eyes, and which format is the most engaging to interact with. From there, we could use their feedback to improve our formats or pick other formats that are better at accomplishing these goals.

After user testing, we also wish to explore other formats and media that would allow us to share success stories. We want to explore the media and formats that we were not able to try out during our design process. Creating videos about 4-H’s youth, mission, and programs could help 4-H have a more engaging media and these videos could be shared to many 4-H members. We also contemplated trying out podcasts and newsletters, where each new episode or issue could highlight a new success story from the 4-H database.

Overall, we tried to use these success stories to capture the attention of a wider audience and rebrand the image of 4-H away from just agriculture. However, we recognize that there are potentially other better ways of rebranding and spreading awareness of this organization. Given more time, our team would have tried to explore different ways of rebranding. We would research how other non-profit organizations promote their programs and their organization and how they use their social media, conduct outreach, organize fundraisers, and capture the attention of their audiences. Even though we finished our semester with 4-H, we know that 4-H will continue to find other ways of rebranding and helping their youth and organization thrive.

Final Presentation