Solano Grown Project Wins NACo Achievement Award

Solano County press release

SOLANO COUNTY – A centerpiece of the marketing efforts has been awarded a 2011 National Association of Counties Achievement Award for its effective and creative solutions.

The website – www.solanogrown.org – provides a hub for both local growers to communicate with each other and to market their products to the public.  The infrastructure behind the scenes of this website reflects months of thoughtful planning among local farmers, the Department of Information Technology, Department of Agriculture, and the County Administrator’s Office.

“This project serves as an example of what can be accomplished when private businesses and government agencies work together for their communities,” said Jim Allan, Solano County Agricultural Commissioner.

Between May and September 2010, a grower stakeholder group worked with County departments to develop a business plan for a website that can be easily maintained by hundreds of local growers. The growers also wanted to know how the Solano Grown website was directing traffic to their respective websites. 

The solution was to develop a members’ only area for Solano Grown members to log in and updated their profiles.  The fill-in-the-blank format enables the growers to enter information once and populate that information throughout the various sections of the website.

Standard website analytical software doesn’t track where a web user goes when they leave a site.  To get the information the growers needed, the Solano County’s web development team developed customized programming to measure the traffic as it flows through the website and out to the individual grower web link.

“When we started, our goal was to develop a website that serves as a public portal for people looking to contact local producers of food and fiber,” Allan said. “By the time we launched the website, we had developed an entrepreneurial partnership with our local farmers and strengthened our interdepartmental collaboration.”

The development of the website was part of two-year U.S. Department of Agriculture Marketing Branch grant to establish a local branding identity for Solano County area agricultural producers.

The Solano Grown project began in February 2010 when the Solano County Agriculture Department and University of California Cooperative Extension began working with a representative group of local growers.  The objective was to move forward on a need identified as part of the Solano County Agricultural Futures Project completed in 2008 that encouraged the development a local brand to help market products produced in Solano County.