Announcer:	The Missouri State Journal, a weekly program keeping you in touch with Missouri State University.
Emily Yeap:	What do you love about Springfield and Greene County? What are some things you'd like to see changed? A group of Missouri State University communications students is seeking for online feedback from community members as it gathers data for the 2017 Springfield Greene County Community Focus Report. Published every two years, this report identifies our community strengths and weaknesses. It's part of the group’s service learning project for a Community Programs and Issues Management class at MSU in partnership with Community Foundation of the Ozarks. I'm Emily Yeap. MSU communication Instructor Didem Koroglu joins me today to share more about this project. 
Didem Koroglu:	Our communications program students this year took this project. Our main goal for our class is to learn about strategic planning, so this fit really wonderfully with our mission for the class and we have a lot of seniors in our class, so this is kind of their last project going out into the community, before they graduate … to give back to the community that they've called home for four years. Specifically, they are working on the community engagement piece. One of the things that the steering committee said is, "We want to hear from more groups," and they wanted to utilize social media to engage with especially the younger audience in Springfield and Greene County.
	They came to us and said, "We want to use a tool called Padlet to learn about the thoughts of our community members," and so they wanted to use Facebook, and also we launched a Twitter account to go with this, but our main goal was to get community members to comment away on Padlet. Our students are taking leadership, in terms of getting the word out there, managing the whole process, they've written the modification guidelines, they've set up the Padlet page, Twitter, Facebook account, and they are managing it daily. 
Emily Yeap:	What is Padlet and how does it work? MSU senior public relations student Blake Shepheard explains.
Blake Shepheard:	Padlet is a social media platform that is similar to a Pinterest board, and Padlet is used to answer questions, or to field questions, or to ask questions that then different people that go to that website can answer those questions. It's really, really valuable to see what other people are saying, and then to comment on that. It's similar to a Facebook wall, or to a Pinterest page. 
Emily Yeap:	The Padlet board has been live for a few weeks now, but the group welcomes even more input until April 20th.
Blake Shepheard:	We want to hear from community members, to hear the really, really great things they love about Springfield, and some things that maybe they have concerns about. So, we wanted to hear, everything, from everyone that's willing to share, because everyone who lives in Springfield, for any time at all, there's got to be some things they love about it, and some things they can see being improved. We've gotten a lot of really great feedback, but we know there's a lot more out there that could contribute to the project. 
Emily Yeap:	Koroglu encourages community members to take advantage of this opportunity to shape the future of Springfield and Greene County. 
Didem Koroglu:	If we're living in this community, we want to give back to our community and make our community better, so this is their chance to make their voice be heard by community leaders, as well. It's a great platform to share ideas, be aware of issues, and make sure that their voice is heard. We will be compiling all of the information from Padlet, and we will be putting together a document where we will evaluate all of the data and to see some of the themes that are emerging, and then we will present that, and submit that to the steering committee, and they will actually go ahead and review. They will take this input and directly edit and put it in the report.
Emily Yeap:	Shepheard says this project has helped him and his classmates learn more about not only communications, but also the community they live in.
Blake Shepheard:	It's been a really great experience working on this project because it's allowed us to really embrace the public affairs mission we talk so much about. To me, it really closely identifies with community engagement, and so we've really strived to better understand our community and to better understand how social media, community engagement and these communication efforts can then be transferred over to the city and over to these leaders in the community to really create initiatives that are effective, and to better projects that are currently going on. 
Emily Yeap:	To give your input for the 2017 Springfield, Greene County Community Focus Report, visit padlet.com/sgfcommunityfocus2017/communityboard by April 20th. For more information, contact Koroglu at 417-836-4423. I'm Emily Yeap for the Missouri State Journal. 
Announcer:	For more information, contact the office of University Communications at 417-836-6397. The Missouri State Journal is available online at ksmu.org.