If you sign up for Cultivate Michigan, we'll ask you to to complete a profile on the Cultivate Michigan site and to track your local food purchasing through our quarterly surveys.

Entering this information helps you keep track of your local purchasing over time, and helps us to measure statewide progress toward the goal of getting 20% Michigan food in institutions by 2020. Check out our Guide to Signing Up for more information.

Each year, Cultivate Michigan will feature four foods available seasonally. By highlighting these foods, we hope to increase demand for them and, in the long run, institutions' access to them.

As a participating institution, you'll receive:

• Access to a Dashboard on the Cultivate Michigan site, where you can track purchases and see progress over time.
• Purchasing guides to help make it easier for you to find, buy and use each featured food. From these guides, institutions can learn how to source Michigan products from distributors or directly from farmers, and find recipes that have been tested and perfected by food service members.
• Marketing materials you can use to promote Cultivate Michigan's featured foods and share the results of your efforts with staff members, eaters and communities.

If your facility is part of a larger network of institutions, there is an option for enrolling multiple institutions with one user account or creating one account for the broader health system or school district, etc.

Start by creating your user account and identify your institutional name as broadly as possible (e.g.,  Healthy System A). Once approved, you can choose to fill out a single profile with information from the broadest institution, and then track only the combined purchasing, or create separate profiles for each facility and track each one separately.

Option 1: Single profile - After logging in, complete the Profile using the institutional name you signed up with, and the combined information for all facilities.  Then when you complete the Quarterly Surveys about local purchasing, use the purchase totals from all the facilities combined.

Option 2: Separate profiles - Log in and start by completing a Profile for one specific facility, using that facility name and relevant information.  Once you submit this Profile and are taken to the Dashboard, click the link to "Add Another Institution" and complete a new Profile for each remaining facility.  When you complete the Quarterly Surveys about local purchasing, enter each facility's purchase numbers into a separate survey specifically for that facility.

If you have questions or want to verify if other institutions you're connected with have already signed up, send an email to info@cultivatemichigan.org.

We rely on the quarterly surveys to be able to measure your progress toward the 20% by 2020 goal, and to measure our progress statewide.

New Quarterly Surveys become available every three months, and will ask you to:

• Enter which (if any) of the Featured Foods you purchased
• For each of the Featured Foods you purchased, you will be asked to:
  • Enter what you spent in dollars on Michigan-grown
  • Enter what you spent in dollars overall
  • State the sources
  • Tell us about any new varieties you may have tried or wanted to try
• Enter your total food spending in dollars for the quarter

Once you are done, hit Submit and you will be able to see the completed survey on your Dashboard.