Evaluation, Data Collection and Reporting

Tucson Water and AMWUA worked together to define the key questions to ask and the data to collect that is of most importance to them as our sponsors and aligned both county's annual reports.

New Website

Recently developed and launched, our new, shared, bilingual Smartscape website is a critical component of the program. For landscape professionals, it provides information on upcoming Smartscape training in both Maricopa and Pima Counties and promotes the value of training and certification. For residents and businesses, the website details the value of hiring trained, certified landscape and irrigation professionals, while highlighting Smartscape graduates by enabling consumers to search for and contact trained professionals available for hire.

New Branding, Cohesive Programming and Messaging

Development of the new website gave us impetus to be more cohesive in all of our marketing materials, as well as course content, between both counties. We worked with a professional marketing firm to develop new branding to complement the new Smartscape website, and worked together to align our courses.

With the resulting increase in sharing of resources, technical ability, and ideas, our programming has grown to a much higher standard of delivery!

The 2019-2020 program cycle has been marked by innovation, adaptation and demonstrated the resiliency of our program. We look forward to the next 12 months and putting these new tools and skills to work to expand our outreach and impacts in a radically changed educational environment.

This year, with people spending more time at home than ever, we’ve seen that landscapes are highly valued. People are investing time and money into enhancing their outdoor spaces. They are becoming increasingly aware of the need for healthy, sustainable, water-efficient landscapes. We recognize this as an opportunity to help connect them with businesses that create and maintain them.

We intend to become a “household name” - and ensure that Smartscape is known as the “go to” community resource for quality education and information. We are doing this by building stronger connections with local "green industry" companies, and by developing new, targeted community outreach strategies.

People, both professionally and recreationally, are learning and taking classes in new ways. As we look to the future, we recognize that digital platforms will continue to be a way that Extension must provide learning opportunities to our communities.

Smartscape is continuously looking for ways to improve online learning experiences by providing user-friendly, engaging, interactive presentations and supporting materials. Our team is currently developing a plan to use D2L (Desire2Learn), an educational platform used for online and blended classroom learning, where our participants can find everything they need in ONE PLACE! We will continue to utilize this resource in the future for both online and in-person courses.

Together, we can adapt – and create change!