The Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) is involved in hundreds of complex research, development and extension (RD&E) projects at any given time—from exploring methods to combat cereal rust diseases to quantifying the biological function of soils. But its core mission couldn’t be easier to understand: to create enduring profitability for Australian grain growers.

“We exist to help Australian farmers increase their profitability and sustainability,” said Danielle Gault, Communications Manager – West for GRDC. “We help them do that by investing in RD&E projects and communicating the outcomes of this research back to them through various channels, including social media. They use the information to improve their farming systems and make them more profitable and sustainable.”

Communicating to a seemingly niche audience might sound straightforward, too—but that’s not the case for GRDC. “We serve all grain growers in Australia, which means our primary audience is demographically broad—from young growers straight out of university to experienced growers in their 60s and 70s,” Gault explained. “All these groups use social media in very different ways. So, our main challenge is to communicate messages in a multilayered way, from 30-second Reels to in-depth, 1,000-word articles, so that we can deliver value to our entire audience, which also includes researchers.”

How can Gault and two other colleagues effectively meet this challenge, given that none are focused solely on social media management for GRDC? They rely on Sprout Social, which the organization has used for nearly a decade. “Sprout lets us post at a high frequency across multiple channels, but in a structured and considered way that is based around our specific goals for each platform,” Gault said.

Sprout isn’t just supporting our social strategy—it’s making it happen. Sprout allows us to perform at a level above what you might expect for a small social team with limited resources. We get a lot of high-quality content out to our audiences every week. We trial, test and measure. And we track and adapt to trends quickly.
Danielle Gault
Communications Manager - West

Using Sprout’s reporting to identify top-performing content and track audience feedback

Grain growers in Australia have more than a passing interest in GRDC’s work. They help fund it through levies on the agricultural products they grow, including wheat, coarse grains like barley, pulses such as chickpeas, and oilseeds like canola. The Australian government also invests in GRDC by matching growers’ levy contributions up to a certain percentage. It has a similar co-investment model for the 14 other Rural Research and Development Corporations (RDCs) in the country, including Dairy Australia and Wine Australia.

Gault, GRDC’s communications manager for the entire western region of Australia, said she is amazed “by the scale and breadth of what the organization does.” As of early 2025, that work includes investing in more than 800 different RD&E projects, many of them multiyear in scope and conducted in collaboration with universities or science agencies.

Keeping grain growers and other interested parties informed about these projects and other news and topics of interest requires GRDC to publish fact sheets, videos, podcasts, its flagship magazine, Groundcover Online, and other content online and offline. It also hosts numerous events throughout the year, from webinars to workshops. GRDC’s channels on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and LinkedIn play a crucial role in helping the organization to promote its wide and diverse range of content and events—and also, elevate brand awareness.

“Part of our organizational success metric is ensuring that grain growers are aware of the projects we do, and the work their levies are funding,” said Gault. “We monitor both traditional and social media to gauge attribution for the projects that GRDC invests in.”

Tagging and Reporting in Sprout helps Gault and her cohorts to identify which content is hitting the mark with audiences on social and easily share results with key stakeholders, including GRDCs executive team. “Our leadership team is particularly interested in understanding the specific content that is getting the most engagement—especially since we changed our strategy from primarily pushing out information to our audiences to trying to engage more with them.”

That shift in approach includes finding opportunities to use humor when appropriate. One win that Gault highlighted to leadership in a Post Performance Report from Sprout was a punny post from 2023 about “cropping.” It went viral, earning a reach of 3.5 million and 60,000 engagements.

A Facebook post from GRDC featuring a grain meme

This post was an installment of GRDC’s “Friday Funny” series, which Gault and her team launched in 2022 to engage audiences by offering a lighthearted take on grain growers’ vocation. The series is also intended to help GRDC take a break from its content offerings that are typically technical and dense.

“At the end of a busy day, people may not be in the headspace to read Ph.D.-level content about plant breeding,” Gault said with a laugh. “So, we need to package up what GRDC does in a way that’s easy for our primary audience to absorb and that also helps build awareness for our brand and attract new audiences, too.”

With Sprout’s Reporting, we can bundle insights from across channels and understand what is working well and what’s not. The reports have become essential to informing our content and social strategies. I even generate reports specifically on our podcast and video social performance.
Danielle Gault
Communications Manager - West

Measuring success and making plans to optimize content for different platforms

For the past few years, Gault and her team have been on the front line of helping GRDC to transform its social strategy and social brand voice to a more engagement-focused, content-driven strategy. And according to Gault, that includes using more storytelling, in addition to more humor.

“Grower stories and case studies are absolutely, by far, our most popular content,” she said. “It’s that peer learning element. Farmers want to know what other farmers are doing, and what their successes and challenges are. And they want to learn about new technology or new research in the language that growers use.”

Gault said GRDC has also been experimenting more with video, especially short-form video. “We’ve had to work very hard to bring that strategy into social with our team’s limited time and resources. But in the past 18 months, we’re much more active in the Reels space on Instagram and with Shorts on YouTube. We’ve already had some successes, like our video for National Agriculture Day that had sweeping shots of paddocks and farm machinery, farmers at work and rock music.”

A GRDC Instagram Reel highlighting National Agriculture Day 2023

Gault said that video received a lot of positive feedback, including from people who took the time to send emails to GRDC to say how much they loved the content. “That was such a nice outcome,” she reflected. “It doesn’t often happen that you get social feedback outside of social! It signaled to us that we are heading in the right direction.”

More proof of success came in the form of performance metrics for 2023, which showed that the GRDC was realizing strong overall returns from its new social media strategy. Gault shared some of these metrics, which were gathered using Sprout:

  • 101% growth in video views
  • 79% increase on impressions
  • 63% boost in engagements

“We essentially doubled our video views, which we were excited about,” said Gault. “In 2023, we also saw audience growth of 13.9% across all the channels we use. And for some specific channels, the rate was significantly higher. For example, our audience growth on LinkedIn was 37.5% in 2023.”

Looking ahead, Gault says she is eager for GRDC to take a more rigorous approach to optimizing content for each social media platform it uses and experimenting with strategies that appeal best to the different generations of growers the organization needs to reach through those various channels.

“Sprout is very good at helping us to be strategic with our approach. It gives us such a nice clear snapshot of what’s happening across our channels,” Gault said. “Sprout helps us choose optimal posting times and ensure that we don’t put out too much content or overlap efforts. We’d have to do all this manually otherwise, which I just don’t think would be possible for our small team.”

To find out how Sprout Social can help you make the most of your resources to optimize content and increase audience engagement across all your social channels, request your free demo today.

Sprout’s core features for publishing, community management, reporting and listening are essential to our team. And because we publish a high volume of posts—3,615 in 2024 alone—we find the publishing and scheduling tools in Sprout exceptionally useful.
Danielle Gault
Communications Manager - West