Tidying your Upshot account
This guide aims to provide tips for organisations to help keep their Upshot account user friendly for them and their fellow users.
Many of the elements within this guide will be particularly relevant for organisations who have been using Upshot for some time and their account has become busy. As such, we will explore how some elements can be more formally 'archived' such as attendees, whilst for other areas like activities or surveys there are some common practices which can be helpful to organise these.
Note: Some of the actions within here can only be completed by users with the System Admin role.
Users
Users are those individuals that have access to your Upshot account. Each User may not need access to all projects or require the ability to complete all actions on the system. This can be a practical choice but also help to simplify things for other users, narrowing what they can see.
Upshot employs user-based access roles, as well as the ability to define project access. System Admins on your account can amend this at any time so it is worth them familiarising themselves with the different User Roles and how to amend these, and access to projects, for existing users.
Over time other users will come and go in your organisation, and when a team member leaves it is important to ensure they can no longer access the sensitive data on your organisation’s Upshot account. System Admins can deactivate users at any point, more about this here.
Attendees
Attendees on Upshot, the individuals that you work with, may overtime no longer actively engage with your services.
Tidying the list of available attendees may be practical to help manage your account, so that users are presented with a list of only relevant attendees when using the search bar, but also ensure that previous attendees cannot be engaged with by mistake, whilst also potentially being necessary dependent on any data retention policy your organisation holds.
Upshot provides two options for organisations to manage these former attendees known as ‘Archiving’ and ‘Pseudonymisation’. Both options can be completed for individual attendees or a set of attendees in bulk.
The archiving feature will allow you to store attendees separately to your main database that are no longer actively engaging in your projects and activities. Their data remains but these attendees are no longer directly accessible for day-to-day use. For instance, they will no longer be found when using the ‘search bar’, which can help to de-clutter your account. Archiving can be reversed if the attendee returns to using your organisations services.
Pseudonymisation is a permanent step and is not reversible. Personal identifiers are deleted or scrambled, and only historical participation data is retained. This process can only be complete by System Admins on your account and the implications of pseudonymisation should be carefully considered before completing for attendees.
More about both these features can be found in the Archiving and Pseudonymisation guide.
Data Display Options
Attendee Data Fields
Attendee Data Fields are data collected about an attendee, either at initial registration or updated later, or are those fields defined for any head count sessions.
Over time things change, and Attendee Data Fields that your organisation has used in the past may no longer be needed.
System Admins can update whether existing fields should be set to 'Not displayed' if they are no longer needed. This can be done via Admin > Data Display Options, making the changes and then ‘saving’ halfway down the page. Note this can be done for both default and custom data fields.
Crucially, by setting the fields to not displayed, none of this data is lost if ever needed again for reporting purposes, it is simply hidden from the page when viewing an attendee profile or head count session.
If organisations are also making use of the Attendee sign-up form feature it is recommended to double check the configuration of any forms currently being used to ensure they reflect any changes made to the Attendee Data Fields.
Timeline Events
Similarly, the above can be completed for Timeline Events. Hiding event types that are no longer relevant can make it easier for users to add the relevant Timeline Event type to attendees when needed. To complete this System Admins can again go to Admin > Data Display Options scroll down to the second half of the page and amend whether Global or Custom Timeline Event options are shown. For Timeline Events with the Single-choice dropdown event type, individual options within the Timeline Event type can be made not displayed.
Projects & Activities
Over time Projects can become busy. Whilst there is no limit to the number of activities and sessions an organisation can have within a project, sometimes it is practical to consider some of the below.
Activity Groups can be a helpful way to organise your list of Activities within a project. Once an Activity Group is created, activities can then be moved into this group, which helps to structure and segment the Activities page. These groups can be expanded or closed by individual users which can help to navigate the page. Additionally, Activity Groups are a layer that can be used in various reports on the system.
For individual Activities the list of these is always shown alphabetically. If some activities are no longer in use, it may be helpful to rename these and put a ‘z’ at the beginning (or similar) to drop these to the bottom of the list. This can be done by clicking Edit Activity.
There is no formal way to 'archive' activities, but using a combination of the above can be helpful. Adding an Activity Group called 'zArchived' and then moving older activities into this group, old Activities can be separated from your current activities.
In some instances, perhaps based around the calendar, financial or reporting year, it might be best to create a brand-new version of your Project to start with a clean slate. The existing project data would still be retained and could be reported on. There are some limitations to reporting across projects, so it is best to consider these before implementing this solution. If you would like to discuss this or a new replacement project does need adding please contact support@upshot.org.uk
Sessions
Sessions Grid
The Sessions Grid can be a quick way of managing the register for different sessions of an Activity.
The Grid displays all your sessions for an activity along the top of the page, and all the attendees that have ever attended that activity down the left-hand side.
Whilst this is generally helpful, over time the list of sessions can be vast, with eleven sessions displayed on a page. Users can use the Grid’s date filter to narrow to a particular date range.
Additionally, it may be the case that some of these attendees no longer actively engage with not only this activity, but your organisation overall. The processes previously mentioned around Archiving and Pseudonymisation could prove helpful here as this would then move any of these attendees to the bottom of the list when using the Grid.
The above suggestions may not be practical in some instances. In cases where the list of attendees has become unmanageable because the activity has been running for some time, it is worth considering whether to bring the existing activity to a close and create a new version of it.
For instance, there may be a 'Youth Club' activity with lots of attendees who have previously participated. Rather than continually adding sessions for the following year, it could be worth considering adding a new version of the Youth Club activity called 'Youth Club 2025' or similar. This would give the Grid a fresh start for this new activity.
The necessity of when to bring an activity to a close and start a new one may differ per organisation, this could ad hoc or perhaps based on calendar or financial year or smaller time increments. New activities can be added by following the steps here.
Reporting across activities is possible via features such as Activity Type , Activity Groups or selecting each Activity via the People or Attendance Reports. If you need a new Activity Type adding or would like to discuss this, please contact support@upshot.org.uk
Deleting Sessions
Sessions may have been created for an Activity that are no longer needed. This may be the case in instances whereby recurring sessions have been created for the year ahead, but the existing activity has come to an end. Sessions can be deleted individually either within a session or via the Sessions List, alternatively multiple sessions can be deleted at once via the Edit Draft Sessions page. More about this here.
Surveys
Surveys can be a great way of capturing additional feedback from attendees to really show the impact your delivery is having. Upshot has an inbuilt survey tool and more detail on this can be found here.
Organisations may want to tidy their list of Surveys found under Evidence > Show Surveys.
It is possible to completely ‘delete’ or retire surveys that have never been used.
For any surveys that have been used and have responses against them, most organisations will want to retain the survey responses for reporting purposes and so deleting is not desired.
As such, it may be a case that the organisation would just like to make it clear to their colleagues which are the 'current' and 'older' surveys within the list. Whilst there is not currently a formal way to 'archive' surveys, the list of these runs alphabetically and the name of a survey can be edited at any time, more on this here. Some organisations may therefore find it helpful to edit the name of the survey and put a 'z' in front of those not actively being used to move them to the bottom of this list.
Full guidance on this process can be found here – Removing, Deleting and Tidying Surveys.
Media
The Media functionality allows organisations to store additional evidence about the work they deliver. This is not limited to photos and videos; organisations can upload various documents, such as word or excel files, PDF’s, MP4 etc. When uploaded, these files can be associated to various elements, such as attendees, activities, locations and outcomes, this then allows these files to be found more quickly later.
All media uploaded will be stored within the Media Library (Evidence > Show Media). This is organised by the date the file was uploaded and has filters available down the right-hand side for the various media associations mentioned earlier to narrow this list.
Sometimes files may not have been given a clear ‘Title’ or have not been associated to relevant elements which can make it harder for users to later find this evidence when needed.
Whilst the user that uploaded the file can edit it at any time, System Admins also have the ability to Edit and Delete any Media files allowing them to tidy this area.