Upshot helps you tell your stories. By enabling the easy collection of data and reporting, you can gain insights into how you are doing in real time. Upshot allows you to communicate your learnings and successes with your own statistics and evidence, all gathered in one place. This means your information is stored securely, but is also ready to share and present to stakeholders, participants, followers and the wider community.
1. Upload media!
On Upshot, anyone with access to your account can upload electronic files to the system. These can be videos, photos, sound files or scanned documents – to name a few. Encourage delivery staff to take photos from sessions, upload videos of success, or sound bites of excellence to the system. This is extremely easy to do straight from a smartphone. As files are uploaded these can be tagged against individuals, projects, locations, and even outcomes. Over a period, you will build up a bank of media files that can be queried and searched through. This provides you with a real-time feed of “front line” content which showcases your amazing work.
2. Get your communications/marketing team involved in Upshot
There are a range of different user roles in the Upshot system suited to specific members of staff in your organisation. One well-suited to someone in your communication or marketing team would be the Project Director role. This allows the user to look at media files that have been uploaded by delivery staff (pictures and videos included) as well as run top-line reports to get big numbers ideal for info-graphics or communication stories – they will not, however, have access to personal or potentially sensitive information.
3. Use a participant’s timeline to create a case study
Participant timelines are a great way to capture what has happened or changed with a participant. On the timeline, you can enter information about achievements – such as receiving qualifications, entered employment or a drop in BMI. On the timeline, you can also add in anecdotal notes or testimonies. Over a period of time, if events are added on an ad-hoc basis you will have the basis of a semi-structured case study for an individual. Through Upshot you can create a report which can then be downloaded and edited in Microsoft Word – it includes all timeline events, personal details, media items the individual has been tagged in plus attendance records – showing a great story of progress and development.
4. Visualise your data
One great way to visualise your data in Upshot is using the mapping feature to geographically map your participants and delivery locations to illustrate your reach. You can also apply overlays onto these maps to show deprivation levels your participants are from. Alongside this, we champion the use of easy-to-use (and free) info-graphic tools that are out there (Vengage is a popular and intuitive example) to turn your data into info-graphics that can be shared on social media or externally.
5. Upshot is not just statistics – look at the bigger picture
Through Upshot you can run reports – namely the Statistics Report – to get your top-line numbers that are great to shout about. However, one of the big perks of Upshot is the fact the system allows you to look at the bigger picture. When shouting about the number of people that have turned up to your programme, or the number of hours you have delivered try to utilise Upshot to provide context to this. For example, 5426 participants have attended our programmes last year and 80% have progressed in education. By using raw data and a percentage we are also being transparent about the version of the truth. Upshot allows you to collect and report on this information easily and consistently – try to utilise it!
If you have any questions or are interested in finding out more, please contact us at info@upshot.org.uk.
