Involving the Community in Innovative Outreach

This January, University of Nevada Cooperative Extension's Radon Education Program sought new and innovative ideas for getting the radon message out to the public. Among several new efforts was using volunteers to help during NRAM and an idea suggested by our area director -- to hang door tags on houses in high radon potential areas.

The door tag idea seemed plausible and the area director was willing to do some of the legwork, so I developed two-sided, four-color door tags and had them printed in time to be distributed in Reno neighborhoods during National Radon Action Month.

The design of the door tags included a coupon for a free test kit, radon facts regarding what radon is, how to test for radon, and contact information with our program’s toll-free number and Web site. The tags were relatively inexpensive to print, as 1,000 tags cost $212. (Click here to view the design of the Nevada Radon Education Program door tags.)

We used volunteers from the Master Gardener Program and Retired Senior Volunteer Program to distribute tags in their neighborhoods or in areas they were familiar with. Ten volunteers distributed 1,000 tags within a two-week period. Depending on the layout of the neighborhood, 50 door tags took about two hours to complete. Most of these areas had high radon potential based on our database of test results. The volunteers were enthusiastic about spreading the word around their neighborhoods, getting exercise and completing volunteer hours. Also, whenever a person brought a door tag coupon into the office for their free test kit, we would notify the volunteer that distributed the tags in their area. This provided our volunteers with a "good feeling" for having contributed towards our mission and made their time and effort seem more worthwhile.

The coupon serves as a measure for "results" for this project, as the coupon implied that it was needed in order to get a free test kit (even though we were giving out free test kits) at the Washoe County Cooperative Extension Office. The number of people who brought in door tags has totaled 34 to date. Compared to the number of tags that were distributed, this number is minimal, however, we know of several mitigations that occurred as a result of this project. Also, 23 of the test kits from this project have been used, providing a 67.6 percent usage rate. The project may have generated more people requesting test kits than we know of, as friends or relatives could have come to the county office requesting a test kit without a door tag.

January efforts included a lot of news releases, news stories, TV reports, program presentations, and displays, so our coverage in this area was extensive. Of course, not everyone gets the newspaper or hears the information on radio and TV, so door tags are just another venue for getting the word out. All of our outreach activities, combined with our door tags, serve to reinforce the message that people heard during NRAM. The project was interesting, different and fairly inexpensive to do.

Using volunteers during NRAM was also a new idea that worked out well for our program. Volunteers were scheduled during business hours to hand out test kits at the Washoe County Extension Office. We had distributed 1,300 test kits from the Washoe County office last January, which caused a bit of chaos in the front office. We thought we could alleviate the brunt of that chaos this year by using volunteers. A training session in early January was a prerequisite to helping so that each was informed about the radon health risk, the need to test homes for radon, how a home can be fixed and other pertinent radon information. They not only helped by giving out test kits, they also helped with office work and distributing door tags.

If we were to do the door tags again, I don't know that we would change anything. In fact, I have ordered another 1,000 tags to distribute to more neighborhoods in the near future, as they were not date specific. Currently, we have only distributed tags in one county, but another county educator suggested we might use some youth groups for community service projects in their county. The coupon lists three different county offices to redeem the coupon, so we have future latitude for expanding it to the other areas.