As a specialist, helping agents find innovative methods for communicating research based information with clientele is a primary goal.  Connecting content area specialists with the needs of local communities in a timely manner is sometimes a challenge.  This year, the Ask the Experts Facebook Live series has continued to bridge the gap between campus staff and local needs in a unique way.  Each month, Family and Consumer Sciences specialists address topics that have been identified by agents as local issues through live video feed.  The Ask the Expert series is hosted by county Facebook pages, with the opportunity for viewing available state-wide.  As the topic is presented, questions can be asked and answered in real time. Following the live broadcast, the recorded video is available for viewing within minutes of the initial broadcast. This year the live broadcasts and recorded sessions have been viewed 7546 times, with an average viewership of nearly 700 per episode.  More than 16K Facebook users have been exposed to FCS related content through the Ask the Experts series.  The average reach of each broadcast is 1530 unique users.

 In addition to getting timely information based on Family and Consumer Sciences issues, these broadcasts are connecting more people with local Extension Facebook pages. While  measuring analytics on each broadcast has yielded the viewing information, traffic on the pages where the Ask the Experts is hosted was also measured.  All of the pages saw increased traffic on the page following an Ask the Experts broadcast.  The most dramatic increase of page reach from the month prior to a broadcast to the month following a broadcast was nearly 50 times (daily reach of 62 unique users prior to broadcast to 2842 daily reach after the broadcast) but the average increase of reach over all the pages is approximately 17 times.  

Finally, agents are able to include portions of Ask the Experts broadcast in traditional face to face programming via the recorded feed.  One agent, who was assigned to teach a lesson about Added Sugars  in every county in the area, actually encouraged program participants to watch the Sugar, Sugar, Sugar episode of Ask the Experts prior to attending the lesson so that they could explore the topic more deeply.