1. Get your initial participant information right & don’t forget to update it!
Make sure that you add all the relevant information against a participant when the person joins the very first time. Having this data in place means that you will find it easier to follow the participants journey through your services and show the evidence of what you have achieved while working with the individual. This information may include standard data such as name, address, D.O.B., ethnicity and medical or disability information, but you can add your own questions which may useful to monitor. Such questions could also be around employment status, physical activity levels or even someone’s favourite football team or favourite food. Don’t forget to update the information when someone moves their home or changes their phone numbers.
2. Keep your registers up-to-date
To be able to follow your participant’s journey through your services, make sure that you add them to the relevant registers. Don’t forget that you can add additional information on your registers such as volunteer information, whether individuals paid for their attendances or any notes about your participants while attending your services.
3. Upload media against your participants
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 such as signed consent forms – 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 smart phone. As files are uploaded these can be tagged against individuals, projects, locations, and even outcomes.
4. Catch important developments in your participants’ life
Have you used the timeline events feature on Upshot? If not, use it, as this enables you to capture all important information about an individual such as accreditation's, changes in their employment status, notes or individual outcomes. These events can be customised by you which enables you to collect data around whether participants have left your services and why, whether they started volunteering with your services or whether they have bought a house. Events can be added from participant profiles or e.g. accreditation's from a register to a whole group. Useful, isn’t it.
5. Track individual’s journey through our questionnaire tool
You might have used the Upshot survey feature to run feedback surveys, but have you ever used it to track someone’s journey? Upshot allows you to create assessment questionnaires similar to the Warwick – Edinburgh Mental Well Being Scale Survey which can be used to ask an individual the same questions at different times of your projects. This way Upshot can compare the responses statistically of an individual or a group over time to find out whether e.g. their mental well-being has changed over time. Once downloaded, you can also create fancy graphs such as the spider diagram to visualise the changes in time. Cool, isn’t it?
Bring it all together! Download the case study of your participant! You will find all their registration form details, the different work areas they have attended with you, the media as downloadable files and all timeline events. Add some information if needed or take off what is irrelevant for your case study. Spice it a bit more up with a snapshot from the mapping tool or the spider diagram with the individual’s journey! That’s it, a great case study for your individual, their parents or your funder is ready to go.
