Part of my role as UC ANR’s Social Media Coordinator is training our communicators on social media best practices. This is an episode of the UC Master Gardener Program’s Brown Bag Training Webinar Series, where I was asked to teach coordinators and key volunteers running UC Master Gardener Program social media channels all over the state of California on how to craft an engaging and effective Facebook Post.
Since March of 2018, I have written a handful of freelance articles on California and Western agricultural news for Agri-Pulse, a DC-based news organization that informs readers of the most up-to-date agricultural and rural policy decisions being made in Washington, D.C. and examine how they will affect you: the farmer, the lobbyist, the government employee, the educator, the consultant, and the concerned citizen. I interview topic experts through relationships I’ve developed and occasionally through cold calling.
Front page of Agri-Pulse on May 2, 2018 with two of my articles displayed, one as the lead story!
Below is a list of all of the articles I have written for them, including the links to the actual articles and downloadable .pdfs of each. Continue reading
This is a teaser for a documentary film I’m directing about the life of John Bidwell, a remarkable figure in 19th century America. Bidwell was integral to California’s history, but has since faded from recent memory. His incredible story is the personification of California’s transitional period between the past and present.
Anchored in Chico, California in the Northern Sacramento Valley and resonating throughout local and regional communities, John Bidwell’s life defined much of present-day Californian values, jurisprudence and economy. This project will reintroduce John Bidwell to contemporary California, demonstrating how his story is also our own. If only one person could serve as the embodiment of California history, it would be John Bidwell. This one man lived such an amazing life in 19th Century California that it almost seems impossible that it actually happened.
All footage in this teaser was generously donated from CSU, Chico’s Advanced Laboratory for Visual Anthropology (ALVA) program.
More information on the documentary to come!
This video was created using Adobe Premiere Pro.
These are my name badges from some of the events I have either been an exhibitor at or an attendee of in the last two years. My jobs at these events usually involved two out of these three things: 1)conducting sales of UC ANR’s publications, 2) representing UC ANR by answering any questions from attendants or providing them with the contact information of someone within UC ANR with more specific knowledge, handing out informational brochures or promotional items, etc., and 3) posting social media content for UC ANR, using conference hashtags in original posts, live Tweeting about the conference or UC ANR speakers at the conference, using Periscope or Facebook Live to broadcast live events from the conference onto social media, etc.
In the collage below you can see some photos of me in a conference setting. Please note that the photos where I’m staring at my phone, I’m actually posting on UC ANR’s social media accounts about speakers or events at the conference. The photos on the right are of me representing UC ANR or handing out informational materials, and the bottom right photo actually captured a conversation at the 2016 California Ag Day at the Capitol conference between Raley’s CEO and Owner Michael Teel and I, where I supplied him with some verbal and printed information about UC ANR’s statewide reach and organizational programs.
This is a screenshot of Raley’s Twitter account retweeting our post about Michael Teel stopping by our booth.
Social Media Stats from California Ag Day at the Capitol (2016 & 2017)
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Here’s a brief overview of some of my content in my professional portfolio, along with links that go directly to the work itself (housed on this site). This document was more or less created with the intent of attaching to job applications or for recruiters. Just click on the image below. Enjoy!
As a contributing member of the Strategic Communications Team for the University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, I was in charge of creating a public awareness campaign using the UCANR social media accounts to promote a new promotional video explaining what UCANR is and what it does in California.
Part of my job for the University of California’s Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources is marketing their digital and printed publications. You can see all of their publications here. Every month we offer sales on selected books and I create the emails in Constant Contact to go out to our different email lists, along with social media posts to our following. Along with the copy, I also created the original graphics. Click on the examples below to see some of my email marketing content (each links to a .pdf of the actual email). Some of them are special sales, like the one with the cave image was for an April Fool’s Day joke, but most of them were for general sales.
Ever since I moved to Ripon when I was 13, I came into contact with people who called almonds “AHmonds,” without the L.
Countless arguments with friends rarely yielded any substantial reason for the specific pronunciation, other than the old almond grower’s joke “It’s an ‘almond’ in the tree and an ‘amond’ on the ground because it got the L shaken out of it!” Someone finally told me that the pronunciation was in the dictionary, so I went and found one (ready to call bullshit on them) and sure enough they were right. BOTH pronunciations were listed under the word “ALMOND.”
Then I moved to Chico for college and went to work as a student laborer at the Chico State Farm, which has about 70 acres of almonds, and I found out that they said “amond” up there too! My knack for history started kicking in and hypotheses started forming in my head.
A few years later I got a job working for the UC’s division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, which has a treasure trove of information on all things involving California’s hundreds of agricultural crops, including almonds.
So I figured, what the hell, I’ll see if I can solve the mystery in my spare time. I contacted some of UCANR’s almond advisors and interviewed them on their knowledge of where people say amond and almond in California. I built a survey and a website to house it, along with a backstory of my hypothesis (and other people have actually come to a similar conclusion as mine by the way), along with an interactive map with data points from the survey. So you can actually visualize where people say almond and amond in California. Super nerdy but this thing has been bugging me for over a decade now.
I came across this old edition of The Harvest, CSU Chico’s College of Agriculture Magazine, in my files a few weeks ago, so I thought I’d throw it on here. This issue from 2012 highlights the new additions to the Chico State Farm staff, including myself! It’s pretty cool my name is on the same page as Temple Grandin‘s too. Click the link below to read the whole magazine.
This is a freelance article I wrote for the November/December issue of California Freemason Magazine, which goes to around 65,000 print subscribers and 114,000 digital subscribers. To see the online article, CLICK HERE!
DECIPHERING THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN PRINCE HALL MASONRY AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD By Tyler Ash
For nearly 200 years, the Underground Railroad has been an elusive, almost mythical aspect of American history, shaping the way we view the cultural and sociopolitical landscapes of the American psyche during the 1800s. A key question continues to elude historians: How did such a large network of people help nearly 100,000 slaves gain freedom while still maintaining a secretive, almost clandestine, status? One fascinating insight may be found by studying some of the leading Prince Hall Masons in Boston during the pre-Civil War period through the post-Reconstruction era. As the sediment of time is gradually lifted from the artifacts of historical truth, researchers are rediscovering fundamental relationships between key conductors of the Underground Railroad and leaders of Prince Hall Freemasonry.
Tyler Ash's Professional Web Resume 