DairyCo

Communicating with our levy payers

Published 17 May 10

DairyCo's annual benchmarking survey of 500 dairy farmers has once again shown that the majority of dairy farmers rely on paper-based materials for information for their farming businesses.

Farming press, reports and newsletters are the most common source of information. Surprisingly, in an ever increasing technical age, emails, DVDs and SMS texts etc are still making little headway as communication channels to reach farmers although websites are increasing their popularity.

"It's an interesting conundrum," says Philippa Stagg, head of communications for DairyCo. "A lot of new media communication tools are extremely effective and relatively cheap. Especially when you are working with thousands of contacts as we are with DairyCo levy payers.

"All things dairy, our bi-monthly newsletter, is currently sent out as a hard copy - that costs over £3,000 in postage each time we send it. The same number could be sent by email for less than £100. And we would also save printing costs.

"But what is much more important to us is that our levy payers get information in the way they want it - some will quite happily switch to email but many more would be completely alienated if we stopped the postal delivery as they prefer to get the hard copy and read it when they get the time.

"This survey is an important part of the work DairyCo does to ensure we are reaching dairy farmers with information paid for by their levy - it gives us a very good steer to the kind of communication methods farmers prefer so that we don't waste time and money on other methods that would be ignored."

But what of those farmers who are switching into more digital communication? "We need to cater for them too," says Philippa. "Work through the next year will see us talking to every levy payer to find out how they want to get information from us. At the same time we can find out what information they actually want - perhaps our grass management programme is not for them, but they particularly want to see the Bull proofs when they come out. We need to make sure our levy payers are getting what they want, otherwise how can they value the service they are paying for."

If you have comments on Philippa's article then email: philippa.stagg@dairyco.org.uk