Albums are ways of grouping projects together. They allow you to aggregate your stats and progress from across multiple projects.
Example scenario
You have a North London project and a South London project
You receive funding from the Mayor of London
On each project you record the number of attendees
If you create a Mayor of London Album that contains the two projects, you can see the total number of attendees from across the two projects
Rules & Relationships
A project can be part of many albums
An album can contain many projects
Each album has
Album Editors: users who have permission to rename the album, add/remove projects, add Album Observers
Album Observers: users who have permission to view the album
Info
Albums are groups of projects. In the example below, the 2021 Portfolio is the Album and it contains several projects. A project can appear in multiple Albums.
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The Progress Panel on the Album page displays the sum total of the progress towards each Progress Tracker from each project within that Album. So if Attendees is a Progress Tracker that’s used on multiple projects, when you look at that Progress Tracker on the Album page, it will show you the sum of the Attendees from across all the projects in that Album.Before you get to this stage, we recommend that you think about your hierarchy of projects
This is the part of the design process where you can categorise your projects based on any similarities they have in terms of surveys they use or what they are about.
Terminology:
Project Template = Project Form = Project Category
What do Project Templates do?
There are 3 things you need to know
Each project can only have one Project Template
Project Templates allow you to automatically apply one or more surveys to a project
When you are on the Manage Projects page in Table view, you can see which Project Template a project has used
Do you need to use Project Templates?
If you have several projects that use identical surveys, then using a Project Template is a good way to simplify the setup process
But if each of your projects is quite unique, you can get by using the inbuilt Project Template (called Project) and not need to create several additional ones.
How to design your use of Project Templates
Create a project for each service you provide:
If you provide the same type of service in different locations - and as a result, work with different clients in each location,
make each location’s version of that service its own project
and make the top-level service a Project Category
A project can only be part of one Project Category
But when it comes to reporting to funders, you can create Albums which group multiple projects together.
A project can be part of several albums
This means you have the flexibility to report on different areas of work to different stakeholders without needing to have duplicate projects.
You can use the Projects per Project Category tab of the Blueprints spreadsheet to map your organisation's projects.
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Example scenarios
Organisations that provide different services within the same location
An organisation provides several services within a city:
1-2-1 therapy
Befriending scheme for isolated people
Mentoring programme to young children
Support groups for parents
How it will be set up on Makerble
Each of the above services will exist as its own Project.
Makerble automatically creates a default Project Category within each organisation.
The default Project Category is called “Project”; so all of the above projects will sit within the “Project” project category.
Organisations that provide the same services in different locations
An organisation provides two services across the country:
1-2-1 therapy through a network of therapy clinics in various cities
accredited training courses for trainee therapists, delivered online and in-person
How it will be set up on Makerble
The organisation will have two Project Categories:
1-2-1 therapy
Accredited training courses
Under each Project Category will be each of the locations where that Service is delivered, i.e.
within the 1-2-1 therapy Project Category there will be the following Projects
1-2-1 therapy Birmingham
1-2-1 therapy London
1-2-1 therapy Oxford
1-2-1 therapy Newcastle
within the Accredited training courses Project Category there will be the following Projects
Accredited training Birmingham
1Accredited training London
Accredited training Online
Accredited training Oxford
Accredited training Newcastle