The team at NorthTexasVegetableGardeners.com has recently rolled out the new helpdesk tool to help provide local vegetable gardeners with quality answers to their questions. The timing of the new helpdesk is happening at the same time as new changes in the NTVG Community Facebook group too, which affects over 31000 members. Also, a new Facebook group, Ask NTVG, has been created as a place dedicated to questions and answers about local vegetable gardening. The purpose of this article is to help explain how these things fit together and help clear up some of the confusion we’ve created.
I asked a long-time member and NTVG helpdesk team volunteer what her thoughts were on the subject, and she described that she has witnessed a change in the group going from an “enjoyable online social interaction between gardeners into a Fast-Food combination of ID/pest management requests“. Her words are included below for context.
As the North Texas Vegetable Gardeners Group has expanded, the posts have experienced some significant changes. Instead of the sharing of harvests, discussion about the challenges/joys of gardening, and the exchanges of vegetable storage/recipes, the posts became less conversive and more questioning (and even demanding). What is eating my tomatoes? What are these spots? Where can I buy mulch? When do I plant broccoli? HELP! These questions became increasingly repetitive. I saw 8 photos of hornworms in a single day with the SAME question: What is this? Clearly, members were not looking at the archived topics to address these common issues. Even more noticeable was the increasing incidence of members misidentifying the pest, or recommending a clearly unsuccessful solution (BT for a serious roly-poly infestation or neem for fungal blight were recommendations I saw this week for example). These inadvisable recommendations lead to dead plants and wasted money. Experienced gardeners (and original members) began to be less active or leave the group. I have considered leaving due to this evolution of an enjoyable online social interaction between gardeners into a Fast-Food combination of ID/pest management requests. “I just want a quick answer right now, not your commentary on the problem” is a quote I saw on a recent post.
Carol Garrison
The issue is that the volume and nature of questions coming in were changing the personality and demeanor of the group. This wasn’t a problem when the group had a few hundred or thousand members, but as the group grew to its current size, the phenomenon became overwhelming. Since the team wishes to both 1) preserve the group personality as a community for sharing stories and close interaction and 2) help provide answers to all the questions that local vegetable gardeners have, something needed to change.
We want to see people’s questions get answered with quality solutions. Since it is not really possible to control what happens on social media, we set up the NTVG helpdesk and gathered up a team of experienced volunteers to help provide the types of answers that lead to gardening success. The NTVG helpdesk is a web-based support ticket system using a framework similar to what businesses use to handle customer support issues. Each submitted question creates a ticket, and the helpdesk team then works to answer each one. Since an experienced vegetable gardener is answering the question, there is an assurance that the answer is higher quality than answers that might be received via social media.
Even though the helpdesk exists, we have heard from many members that have said they love the questions and answers. We have also noticed that asking questions is so easy and the answers come in so fast, that many people prefer asking vegetable gardening questions on social media over everything else. For these reasons, we decided it was best to create a new facebook group for the sole purpose of Asking North Texas Vegetable Gardening related questions. For any current member in the NTVG Community group, a single click will join you to the Ask NTVG group with no hassles. Since both groups are a part of the Facebook platform, users will receive posts from both groups in their personal feeds if they choose to allow that. This solution is almost painless for the users and it solves the problems we were faced with.
We hope this explanation has helped everyone understand the new resources and new changes being implemented. We are confident that the changes and new helpdesk will have a significant positive impact on our local vegetable gardening community, and we hope everyone will find the resources useful.
