Growing up showing livestock, Ellie Staggs always loved beef cattle, but her summer internship with the Indiana Beef Cattle Association (IBCA) is allowing her to show the rest of Indiana why they should, too. As a communications intern, Staggs, a junior studying animal sciences, has found ways to get creative in her storytelling that led her to her final promotional project: the Indiana State Fair.
Starting her summer internship, Staggs said she was tasked with writing five farm spotlights for the IBCA’s bi-monthly magazine, visiting member farmers’ operations to ask interview questions, getting to know the farmers, and taking their responses back to her office to write stories for future publications. But Staggs said she wanted to take her story telling a step further.
“We decided to create videos to accompany our written stories, so we bought little lapel microphones online, uploaded all the clips into iMovie and created videos to post on the IBCA’s YouTube channel,” she said. “It was fun for me and my fellow intern because no one had ever done that for the organization before.”
Building on her video skills, Staggs said tackling the IBCA’s social media pages became another task and included creating a TikTok account to engage with a new generation of followers. Staggs co-hosted a weekly segment called “Beef Bits,” offering viewers fun facts about cattle biology and information about the beef industry. One of their most viewed videos highlighted various products that utilize unexpected parts of a cow, including make-up, leather and pharmaceuticals.
Source: purdue.edu
Photo Credit: istock-cactusoup
Categories: Indiana, Livestock