Palomar Mountain News

Check out virtual State Park walks and talks!  The park is OPEN so you can visit in person, too!  Come on up for our sunny skies and fresh air and be sure to like them on Facebook!

Thanks to Rosemary Johnston for sending the info our way.

———- Forwarded message ———
From: Meyst, William@Parks

Here are links to the videos that myself and Cuyamaca Interpreters, Maggie and Michele, have been posting.

Palomar: https://www.facebook.com/palomarmountainsp/videos

Cuyamaca: https://www.facebook.com/cuyamacaranchostatepark/videos/?ref=page_internal

We had some themes to the videos we made:

Jr Ranger Adventures – these videos followed along with the Junior Ranger Adventure guide that kids can do as a self-guided activity in the park. Each video addresses a different page or section of the adventure guide. Palomar and Cuyamaca did their own version of these videos every week.

Journey into Nature Journaling – These videos focused on showcasing more aesthetic aspects of both Palomar and Cuyamaca and sharing different techniques to document nature.

Draw with Me! – this series was only at Palomar and consists of myself going through the steps to drawing various critters that live in the park.

Live Streams – these are some of the live streams we conducted here at Palomar, and there are only a few because we quickly found out that Palomar does not have the reception quality to be able to do consistent live streams, unfortunately.

I totaled up the engagement we received from our videos and the summary looks like this:

We had 30 videos uploaded to the Palomar Facebook page uploaded from May 2^nd to July 5^th, with 14,481 engagement instances, 1,052 post clicks, and 428 likes, shares, and comments. The most popular videos were the interview with Adam Borrello, our Ranger, and one of the Draw with Me! videos about drawing leaf shapes. To put those numbers in context, we normally receive about 10,000 engagement instances from all of our posts between Facebook and Instagram in a single month combined.

The numbers mentioned above are solely from the videos we uploaded in that 2 month period. So, the public has definitely taken an interest in the videos, and given the circumstances around COVID-19 in San Diego, we are going to continue uploading videos, and they will only be better quality now that we have had the benefit of developing and actually creating these videos. We also were very quick to adapt to these new circumstances and our interpretive team has received a number of honorable mentions when interpretive leaders speak about how interpreters can still reach their audience in these changing times.

During these trying times, people have expressed their gratitude to us for providing small windows of connection to the park when they are unable to visit themselves.

We are going to keep moving forward with connecting the public to the park with videos, live streams, and virtual event such as the upcoming Great California Virtual Campout, which I will have more information on coming up soon.

Please let me know if you need any other information for your report and I’ll be glad to discuss it!

Best wishes,

-Will