County Extension offices across the state address dozens – sometimes hundreds – of consumer horticulture (home gardening) questions each month. It is important to capture these contacts at the county level in MyData. By regularly and accurately recording consumer horticulture contacts, we can have an accurate understanding of the importance of this topic to clients in each county, and it helps prioritize resources and programming for the future.
In short, if we know just how many people are asking gardening questions, we can leverage the money and people needed to address this need!
To standardize and simplify this process, I have created some resources to help enter this information into MyData. Please share this email with all relevant staff at the County Extension Office.
Please compile all consumer horticulture contacts by phone, email, or in-person throughout the month. Then each month, create a new Contact Record in MyData to document those interactions.
Several materials are available to help create and enter a Contact Record. These documents include a guide that outlines what to enter in each field of the MyData Contact Record and provides tips for making it easier. An FAQ document and a form that can be used to document Consumer Hort questions throughout the month. Feel free to use it, modify it, or create your own form to help make the process easier. All three of these documents are on MyExtension on the MyData Professional Development page under “Program and Unit Specific Help Sheets.”
Links to this article are strongly encouraged, and this article may be republished without further permission if published as written and if credit is given to the author, Yard and Garden, and Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. If this article is to be used in any other manner, permission from the author is required. This article was originally published on February 11, 2022. The information contained within may not be the most current and accurate depending on when it is accessed.