By Jessica Silldorff
It seems that with each passing month, I am increasingly impressed with the growth of EatFresh.org and the eagerness of our partners to use it with their clients. This past year and a half has provided us with many learning opportunities, especially around understanding the needs of our partners. As we work more closely with partners, it has become clear that a nutrition educator might look at using EatFresh.org with clients through a different lens than a CalFresh eligibility worker. This sparked an idea to start a webinar series tailored toward specific groups to highlight features of EatFresh.org that can help accomplish different goals, introduce successful partner integrations, gather valuable feedback, and provide an opportunity for questions and answers. Our goal for these webinars is to not only reach our partners more efficiently, but to provide concise, clear steps for integrating EatFresh.org into programming that reinforce the activities of each organization.
In January, Erin and I hosted our first webinar in this series titled EatFresh.org for Nutrition Educators. We highlighted useful features, like searching for recipes by using filters, recipe yield change, Ask a Dietitian, comments on recipes, and how to add a shortcut to EatFresh.org on a smartphone home screen to access the website like an app. Guest speaker, Molly Burke from the San Francisco Marin Food Bank, shared her best practices and tips for using EatFresh.org with her nutrition educators. In particular, she likes to use the Discover Foods pages with clients to learn more about unfamiliar foods, and regularly uses EatFresh.org on a smartphone or tablet with clients for easy access on the go. Like many of our partners, distributing EatFresh.org recipe cards is her preferred method for quickly promoting EatFresh.org to clients. We followed through on requests for an order form for our print materials and now you can place orders for postcards and posters through the Leah’s Pantry website!
The webinar was so popular that we repeated it in February for those who were unable to join the first time. (If you missed either webinar, you can download the slides and watch the recording on our online toolkit.) Between the two webinars, we had participants from 29 organizations serving the CalFresh population in 13 different counties in California!
Curious about future webinars? Sign up for the EatFresh.org partner newsletter and you’ll be the first to know! Our newsletter also highlights new features on the website, partner successes, and best practices, website analytics, and upcoming EatFresh projects.
If you have any requests for EatFresh.org webinars, we would love to hear from you! Contact us.