Session Tags

Session Tags allow you to categorise different sessions within the same Activity. 

For instance, your organisation may run a Youth Club every Friday night, on Upshot the ‘Youth Club’ would be the Activity and the Sessions would be the dates/times of the different Friday nights. 

Some organisations may want to break this down further and identify that on a particular Friday the Youth Club covered ‘Arts and Crafts / Dancing / Football / Table Tennis’ – it could be one of these things or multiple, and on the next Friday some or all of them may be covered again. 

It may not make sense to have these elements set up as separate activities on Upshot, as this would necessitate the need to then create individual sessions and registers for each of these elements, for what was ultimately just one session of the Youth Club on a particular Friday. 

This is where ‘tags’ can be helpful, allowing organisations to record that these different elements took place and gain some reporting insight based on this longer term. 

• Use Cases for Session Tags
• Creating Tags and link them to specific sessions
• Reporting on Session Tags
• Limitations of Session Tags

Use Cases for Session Tags

Session tags are useful when running an activity in which the content of each session differs, for example you might have an activity called “Puzzle club” but you want to differentiate which type of art is the focus of a specific sessions e.g. jigsaw/sudoku/crossword etc…  

In the above example users could add a session Title – this will show in the session list/calendar, which can be useful to use alongside session tags, particularly if you are sharing your Upshot session calendar externally.

There is also the option to add Session Notes to provide anecdotal information about what took place within a session that might be useful if a different person is running the next session for example.  

To be clear, there is no reporting capabilities for Session Titles or Session Notes, so this is where tags can be used if there is a need to report on the information.  

In addition, this can also be helpful to users when filtering their session List within a project, you can filter by session tags, allowing you to easily identify all sessions with a specific tag.  

Other use cases for Session Tags include ideas such as using tags to indicate a specific 'outcome(s)' the particular session contributes to, rather than the activity as a whole. Similarly using the tag to indicate particular 'funders' linked to certain sessions for reporting purposes.

Creating Session Tags and Linking them to specific sessions

Session tags can be created from and linked to sessions from the Add sessions page. They can also be added to existing sessions by clicking on Edit session.

From the Add tags button in the session builder, you have the option to both create new tags or apply existing tags to the session.  

Once clicked, a text field will appear. Type into this field the tag you would like to use. If the tag already exists, it will appear as a dropdown option below the field. If the tag doesn’t appear, to create a new one, once you have finished typing you need to press the “comma” or “tab” key on your keyboard.  

In the above example, the content of one Puzzle session might be “jigsaw puzzles” but the next session might be “sudoku”.  

A single session can be tagged against multiple different tags as well if there is different content, for example the first half of the session might be “jigsaw puzzle” and then the second half might be “sudoku”.  

Reporting on Session Tags

Session tags can only be reported on using the Attendance Report.  

Reports can be exported against single tags or groups of tags together.  

To make reporting as effective as possible, it is important that you clearly outline what the tags are that you will be using, as one user might word something differently to another user, which can confuse things.  This is spoken about further in the 'Limitations' section below.

At Upshot we have built a number of reporting templates to help users to report on their data. These templates allow users to drop existing Upshot report exports into the template, refresh the report and automatically be presented with a summary of the data.

One such reporting template is for reporting on Session Tags.

By copying data from an organisation's Attendance Report export into the pre-built reporting template, organisations can report on their tags in ways such as:

• Amount of sessions, attendees and attendances in relation to specific tags
• In relation to an attendee, the specific tags they have attended and how many times
• In relation to individual sessions, the tags that have been added to them

For more information on our reporting templates and to download the template for Session Tags, please see here.

Limitations of Session Tags

Creation of Tags

As outlined it is important to have a clearly defined list of tags for your team to use, as if the same thing is being tagged slightly differently, this will affect the ability to report effectively.  

A work around for this is to create a single ‘fake’ session, then create and add all the relevant tags to this one session. This means that moving forward from this whenever a staff member creates a session and starts to type in a tag, the options will appear and they can select the relevant tag from those. If the ‘fake’ session is then edited to ‘abandoned and not counted’ it won’t affect any reports. More information on abandoning sessions can be found here.  

Reporting

Within Upshot, you are permitted to set up as many Activities as you want, and Activities have far more reporting capabilities than Session Tags, so it is always worth considering the value of setting up more specific activities.  

As previously mentioned, session tags can only be reported on through the Attendance report, which means that any analysis of tags will need to be done off the system in the Excel export the Attendance Report produces.  

Calendar

If you are making use of the calendar view, particularly if you are linking it externally on your website/social media etc, then the tag won’t appear, meaning that other people within your organisation and external people interested in the content of the sessions won’t be able to see this information.