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Funded Project |
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Funding Program:
IPM Partnership Grants |
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Project Title:
Development of a New IPM Outreach Campaign: A Bold Website and IPM Messages on City Buses |
Project Director (PD):
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Lead State: PA Lead Organization: Pennsylvania State University |
| Undesignated Funding: $20,000 |
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Start Date: Apr-01-2009 End Date: Mar-31-2010 |
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Pests Involved: bedbugs, bed bugs, cockroaches, mouse, mice, rodents, rats, ants |
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Site/Commodity: structural, residential, community |
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Area of Emphasis: outreach, education |
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Summary:
The public can access structural pest information on numerous web sites. Their challenge is to determine which sites offer effective IPM solutions. The goal of this proposal is to reach under-served groups in inner cities and provide them with safe, viable IPM solutions that solve their pest problems. This project proposes an innovative, evidence-based approach through the use of pest specific posters on and in buses in New York City and Philadelphia. The first campaign will address the reemergence of bed bugs. These posters will direct inquiries to a new, easily remembered, structural IPM web site - www.bughelp.org . This site will provide linkages to university-based fact sheets and other web sites containing recommendations and suggestions on a wide range of household pests. Mirroring the efforts to educate the public utilizing posters in mass-transit buses by the NEIPM Community IPM Working Group (CIWG) in 2008, this program will offer valuable information to the public and will provide impact data on web traffic to www.bughelp.org - a new and previously unused site.
Objectives: 1. In consultation with the Community IPM Working Group, we will develop an outreach/communications plan utilizing mass-transit pest posters and a newly acquired web site to educate the public on the smartest, simplest and safest means to combat structural pests. a. Development of 3-5 posters capturing core messages related to structural pest management. b. Create a new web portal titled www.bughelp.org, which will be a hub of general audience IPM and pest information, linking back to consumer-friendly extension information for each state in the Northeast, and possibly the North Central region. c. IPM outreach campaign utilizing posters on mass-transit buses. Proposal |
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Final Report: |
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Outcomes The domain name www.bughelp.org was purchased in June 2008. Construction of the site began in June 2009 with additions and modifications made throughout the contract period. The site went "live" on November 1, 2009 (Appendix 1. Bughelp site). In September of the same year, design on the bus posters was initiated (Appendix 2. Posters). Three different size posters were designed: Interior bulkhead cards (11"H x 28"W); Large tail light posters (21"H x 72"W); and, smaller tail light posters (18"H x 21"W). Posters were printed in October 2009 and placed on buses (Appendix 3. Posters on buses) in the Baltimore Mass Transit Area on November 2, 2009 and continued to run for 8 weeks. Note: some buses continued to carry tail light posters and/or interior cards until June 2010. |
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Impacts From November 2, 2009 through May 4, 2010 there were 1,015 Absolute Unique Visitors to the www.bughelp.org website (Appendix 4. Absolute Unique Visitors. The maximum daily visits occurred on December 4, 2009. Most of the higher daily visits occurred during the weekdays and lower visits on the weekends. Direct Traffic (Appendix 5. Direct Traffic) accounted for 737 visits. These are visitors that typed the Bughelp address directly into the browser without using a search engine indicating the importance of using an easily recallable site name for any advertising campaign. The average time on site by these individuals was 3 minutes, 42 seconds. There were also 312 visits by individuals utilizing Search Engines (Appendix 6. Search Engines). Google was the source of most of the traffic with 271 searches followed by Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Search, Ask, and Images Google for 23, 6, 5, 4, 2, and 1 searches respectively. The time on site for visitors that used a search engine was 3 minutes, 6 seconds. The keywords used during the aforementioned searches (Appendix 7. Keywords) indicate that these individuals also remembered the Bughelp product name'. The top two keywords were bughelp.org' (94 searches) and www.bughelp.org' (56 searches). For the purpose of brevity, only the top 10 keywords are depicted in the appendix. Those pages that were most often visited are shown in Appendix 8. Top Content'. The symbol "/" indicates the home page and accounts for the largest number of pageviews with1,102 of the total 3,365. The next most frequently visited page was the Bed Bug Section and had 799 views. A total of 617 visits came from Maryland with the majority of those (345) submitted from Baltimore City (Appendix 9. State Detail). The discrepancy between the total number of visits (1049: Direct plus Search traffic) and the 617 visits from Maryland is interesting. For some reason, approximately 40% of the traffic was from locations other than where the campaign was conducted. The majority of visits came from the state of New York (156) with New York City accounting for the majority of those (134). |
Report Appendices
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