thinking about your groups, identifiers, and fields

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Thinking about Your Groups, Identifiers, and Fields
• Video Support

Thinking about Your Groups, Identifiers, and Fields

IMPORTANT: In this chapter you will see the words Group (formerly Type 3 Associations) and Identifier a lot. Please note: Identifier is the generic term we use to describe your individual students, mentees, projects, classrooms, schools, etc. Group is the word we use to describe how you organize those individuals.

The Group and Identifier tracking system is incredibly flexible, allowing your team to track multiple types of people, places or projects (Identifiers) without relying on traditional groups and with the ease of asking your reporters to complete a Survey Monkey-type report.

The main benefits of the tracking system for reporters are:

• No matter how many Identifiers a reporter is responsible for reporting on, reporters only need to complete one report per report period—not one report per Identifier.
  
  
• Reporters will be able to see the progress they’re making with each Identifier through Identifier profiles.
  
  
• Reporters will be able to see the work of other reporters working on or with their Identifiers, even if former reporters are no longer active. (This feature could be especially useful if your program needs to transfer data between out-going and in-coming reporters at various times during the year.)

IMPORTANT: Here are a few definitions to help you as you are thinking about Groups and Identifiers:

Group: These are the organizing groups of the people, places and projects that you would like to track.

Identifiers: These are the individual people, places and projects that your reporters will be connected to and can report on within each Type 3 Association.

Fields: These are the fields you create for your Identifiers.

Video Support

The first thing you’ll need to do is decide what type or types of Groups and Identifiers you will create.

• Group: How are the individual people, places, or projects we need to grouped?
  
  
• Identifiers: Who are they? Are they people (students, mentees, volunteers)? Places (schools, classrooms, libraries)? Projects (service projects, housing repairs or builds)?
  
  
• Fields: What baseline, demographic, and historical information do we want to store and use for each of our Type 3 Associations and Identifiers?

Here are some samples to get you thinking about how you might use Groups:

Group of Individuals 

• Beneficiaries
• Students
• Volunteers
• Veterans
• Seniors
• Clients
• Participants

Groups (where the Identifiers are themselves groups)

• Classes
• Classrooms
• Cohorts
• Schools

Places 

• Parks
• Districts
• Neighborhoods

Projects

• Service Projects
• Homes