Design your hierarchy of projects and albums

Owned by Matt Kepple
Last updated: Mar 25, 2024
4 min read

Design your hierarchy of projects and albums so that you organise your work on Makerble® in the same way that you organise your work within your organisation.

Step 1: Pick your model

Several Activities: 1 Location

  • Create a project for each activity

  • To report the results from across all your activities, create an album for that location and add your projects to it

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1 Activity: Several Locations

  • Create a project for your activity in each location it happens in

  • To report the results of the activity from across all your locations, create an album and add your activity projects to it

image-20240130-180424.png

Several Activities: Several Locations

  • Create a project for each activity in each location

  • For example, if you have 3 activities which each happen in 3 locations, you’ll have 9 projects

  • You can then group those projects into albums, with an album for each Activity (each one will have 3 projects) and an album for each Location (each one will have 3 projects)

  • And because projects can be part of several albums, you can organise your albums in as many ways as you want to

Multinational: Several Themes: Several Activities: Several Locations

  • Create a project for each activity

  • Create an album for each programme and add its Activity Projects to that album

  • Create an album for each initiative and add all the Activity Projects from both programmes to that album, i.e. Activities 1-5

  • Create an album for each pillar and add the Activities from all the initiatives' programmes to it, i.e. Activities 1-8

  • Create an album fir each country and add the Activities from the pillars' initiatives' programmes' to it

  • To report across the entire organisation, add all the Activity Projects to an album.

Click the image to see it larger

Step 2: design each Project

You can control every part of a project:

  • Contacts - you can add your contacts to one or more projects

  • Stories - the work you do with a contact is saved to a specific project. If a contact is in several projects, then each story is saved to a specific project

  • Events - create different types of event within a single project. Use event categories to further customise the settings of different events.

  • Forms & Signup Pages - choose which forms you want to use to register, assess and capture additional information about the people on this project

  • Surveys - choose which surveys you want to collect responses for on this project

  • Automations - decide which actions you’d like to automate on this project, e.g. reminder messages, flags or internal alerts

  • Coworkers & Permissions - give each of your signed-in-users a different level of access to each project; or no access to certain projects at all

  • Metrics - choose the outcomes, indicators and outputs you’d like to measure on this project

  • Progress Boards - design the reporting dashboards you’d like to have on this project

  • Settings - choose whether to use timesheets, financial values or a variety of other features on this project

Projects work best when you organise your work at the smallest scale. There are 2 reasons for this:

  1. Flexibility when it comes to reporting

  2. Simplicity for your coworkers

 

Flexibility when it comes to reporting

  • When you’ve divided your work into small chunks, it’s very easy to combine them again in various ways

  • If you need to report your work by Country, Theme or any other way of categorising your work, it’s easy to do this when you simply need to add all the projects of that ‘category’ into an album

 

Simplicity for your workers

  • Your coworkers will thank you for making their lives easier

  • When you have several focussed projects where, for example, you’ve

    • specified the surveys that need to be used,

    • specified the registration forms that need to be used

    • specified the event types that need to be used,

  • your coworkers will find the system straightforward because the only decision they need to make is to choose which project they are working on - once they’ve done that, everything else is laid out for them.

  • Whereas when you have broader projects with some surveys that are used in certain situations but other surveys that are used in others, it introduces complexity which means

    • You need to spend more time training your staff how to use the system

    • Your staff are more likely to make mistakes because they might use the wrong survey or the wrong form in a given scenario

Step 3: put your projects in their Albums