Why spend dollars telling producers how their beef checkoff is invested?
Sometimes producers ask why the Beef Board spends checkoff dollars on producer communications. “Why are you talking to me?” you might ask. “Isn’t that like preaching to the choir?”
Well, here are some facts that help answer these questions:
- The Beef Board has a legal obligation – as well as a moral one – to inform producers about how their checkoff money is spent. After all, would any responsible organization accept people's investments and then not let them know how their money was spent and what the results of those investments were?
- Producers have said time and again that they want the Beef Board to keep them informed: In independent surveys performed every six months, more than 90 percent of beef producers throughout the country have consistently said that it is important to them to know how their checkoff dollars are invested. In fact, the majority say they want even more information than they are getting.
- Those producers who have made it a priority to learn about checkoff programs, and even become involved in beef-promotion efforts directly, may not be the primary targets of basic producer communications, but there are a lot of cattle producers out in the country who would not know about the program at all if we didn't reach out to them. In that sense, then, it’s not a matter of “preaching to the choir,” though the choir very well may be in the room with the rest of the congregation to whom we are speaking.
- At the same time, informed producers are prime conduits of checkoff information to other producers, so keeping them informed to help share messages about the checkoff with their peers remains an important part of producer communications.
Get additional information about your checkoff anytime at www.MyBeefCheckoff.com, by signing up for one of our monthly newsletters, or by following us at one of the social-media links below.
Funded by the Beef Checkoff.
SOCIAL MEDIA