Recording 1:1 Work

Many organisations record their 1:1 / Mentoring / Therapy / Counselling work on the system.

As always on Upshot, organisations can choose between different ways of recording this depending on their needs.

This guide aims to highlight those different options to help organisations pick the method that is right for them.

Please do contact support@upshot.org.uk if you would like to discuss any of these options further.

If you are part of a licence agreement with a funder or Facilitating organisation please also check specific requirements with them for reporting.

Options

When deciding between these options, it's important to consider what you want to record about 1:1 work and what you would like to report back on.

For instance, do you want to record when, where and how long these 1:1 sessions took place for OR do you just want to record the narrative from these.

OR is it both, so you can report on both the amount of time spent with attendees and the narrative from these 1:1 sessions.

These decisions above frame the different options presented in this guide.

Recording Sessions & Registers to track the time spent with attendees on 1:1 work
Recording Timeline Events to capture the narrative of 1:1 work
Recording both elements and the quickest workflow
Reporting on this work if capturing both elements
Other tools to add additional evidence
Key Terms

Recording Sessions & Registers for 1:1 work

This element is crucial if users would like to track the amount of time spent with attendees, whilst also providing information on where they met up with them and the different dates.

In essence this is recording a session for the date, time, location the interaction happened and a register with just the one attendee added.

Tip: When adding the session, it can be helpful to use the optional session Title to highlight what session number this is for the individual as this will be easier to see quickly later.

Organisations may also choose to add the therapist/mentor/support worker who delivered the session onto this register if desired. If so, they should ensure they mark the person who ran the session as either the Session Leader / Support: Mentor or anything else other than Participant to differentiate for their reporting purposes.

Structuring 1:1 work within the project

A key consideration could also be the Activity that these 1:1 sessions are added to. Considering the structure of your Activities can be most useful when thinking about reporting on this work via something like the Statistics Report or the other reporting tools in the system.

Organisations could have just one Activity within their project called 1:1 work (or similar) and add all the sessions to this.

Dependent on the amount of attendees who receive this support, it might be more helpful from a workflow and reporting perspective to separate this work.

This could be by having separate activities for each of the different attendees receiving support OR separate activities for each of the different mentors/therapists.

Activity Groups (could also be used to achieve a combination of the above. Whereby each Activity Group is a different therapist and the attendees they work with are different activities underneath.

Not only do the above decisions help to order the page and make it easier for your users, but they can also make your reporting easier, such as the amount of sessions delivered by a certain therapist.

It is also worth considering whether an Activity Type to link all this 1:1 work together for reporting would be beneficial.

Please do contact support@upshot.org.uk if you would like to discuss any of the above further.

Recording Timeline Events to capture the narrative from 1:1’s

Recording the narrative from 1:1 work, such as the context of discussion or action points can be done via either the Timeline Event feature or Session Notes.

There are three key advantages of Timeline Events over Session Notes in this regard, which is why we would recommend this tool in this instance:

1. There is the potential that the notes from a 1:1 session might be sensitive in nature. With Timeline Events, users can restrict these ‘events’ whereby they can choose the colleagues that can see and report on this information going forward.

2. Viewing this narrative later. An attendee’s timeline would list these in date order, helping to provide a seamless switchover if a colleague or separate therapist starts working with the individual.

3. Timeline events also provide the potential to use the Attendee Report, often the starting point of a case study for lots of organisations.

It is likely to be helpful that there is a specific Timeline Event type to be used by the team to record this narrative on individual’s profiles. This could be called ‘1:1 Notes’, ‘Mentoring Notes’ or similar.

If this does not already exist on your account, a System Admin can add this at any time by going to Admin > Timeline Events. More about this here.

When they initially create this event type they have the choice whether this ‘type’ is ‘Text, Number, Single-choice drop down or Yes/No’

With all of these options users will still be able to add additional notes to capture the narrative.

As such, the most common options picked here are ‘ Text’ because this allows you to add one summary line before the additional notes. This ‘summary line’ can almost be thought of like an email subject header. Users could use this top line to summarise the content underneath in the notes or highlight what session this is with the individual.

Or alternatively ' Yes/No' with Yes being selected and then the narrative added to the notes underneath.

Over time this will build up on the attendee’s profile, allowing it to be reviewed and a seamless transition if another mentor starts working with the individual.

Timeline Events can also be reported on in other ways, please refer to the guide here for more information.

Recording both elements and the quickest workflow

For lots of organisations they would like to record and report back on both, so when the session took place and the detail from it.

To do this it would be a combination of the two areas already covered.

Again, while the narrative could be recorded via Session Notes, the advantages of Timeline Events for this more detailed narrative, highlighted here is why we would recommend the workflow below.

If you haven’t already please do read the information around recording these different aspects covered above:

- Recording Sessions & Registers to track the time spent with attendees on 1:1 work

- Recording Timeline Events to capture the narrative of 1:1 work

The most seamless workflow to achieve this aspect of recording both is described in the steps and video below.

- Add a Session

- Add the attendee to the register & click submit

- Add the Timeline Event directly from this page

Reporting on this work if capturing both elements

Whilst the general reporting tools all still apply, such as:

The Statistics Report to see the number of 1:1 sessions delivered overall
The individuals Attendee Report to help build a case study
The individual attendee Session Report
The tools available when Reporting on Timeline Events

Something users might find particularly helpful in this instance is the export of the Timeline Events Report.

When filtered to only look at the Timeline Event type an organisation has been using to capture their 1:1 notes, the download can present a lot of the detail at once:

Other tools to add additional evidence

As well as the above, organisations can use additional Upshot tools to help provide evidence of their 1:1 work.

This could be in the form of Media - whilst Media can often be pictures and videos, it can also be other types of documents you would like to store and associate with the attendees. More about Media here.

Surveys - can help to show the progress made by an individual. This might be achieved by asking the attendee to complete a wellbeing survey (or similar) and noting the change in their scores at the beginning and end of your work together.

It might also be using the survey function to enable a more structured form to be created on Upshot that is completed by the attendee at regular check in points. More about Creating Surveys here.

Key Terms

Activities:

These are the different things you deliver within each project such as classes, workshops, events, forums, groups, etc. These are often the physical outputs in your programme.

For more information on this please refer to the Activities guide or the short video here.

Activity groups:

Activity groups are specific to each project and allow you to organise your activities into groups. For example, you could have an activity group of Basketball and within the group have Boys Basketball as one activity and Girls Basketball as another. Similarly, you could have an activity group of Health and Wellbeing and within that have activities such as Cooking Classes and Healthy Eating Lessons.

For more information on this please refer to the Activity Groups guide or the short video here.

Activity types:

Activity types are a way of classifying activities for reporting across projects. For example, if you run Boys Football as one activity and Girls Football as another activity you could give them an activity type of ‘Football’. This will allow you to report on everything with an activity type of ‘Football’ altogether. Similarly, you could have an activity type called ‘Skills and Learning’ and this would allow you to report on all your activities across different projects associated with this activity type in one go. An activity type is required when adding an activity.

For more information on Activity Types please refer to the short video here.

Registers:

Registers are added to each session so you can record attendance. You can choose to record the names of people that attend or use a head count, this is defined by the ‘Type’ when creating a session.

Using a full ‘register’ allows you to record the names of all the attendees at a particular session. It also allows you to define the attendee type (e.g. participant, session leader, support worker etc.), whether the attendees have paid for the session, whether they volunteered and how they volunteered. These options are shown in register (details) below. This extra information can enhance your reporting capability. For the full guide to Registers please click here.

Sessions:

These are individual occurrences of an activity. You specify the date, time, duration, location and type of register for each session.

For more information on Sessions please refer to the guide here.

Timeline Event:

Each attendee on the system has a timeline and you can track points of interest on their journey as "timeline events". These record what has happened or changed with a participant outside of regular session data and can often be viewed as individual outcomes from participating in the project.

For more information on this please refer to the Timeline Event guide or view the short video here.