I was wondering if anyone is using something besides the spreadsheet FIRST gives you for Impact Award documentation? I’m looking for alternatives where it’s easier to keep track of photo (files).
Have you tried Airtable or Trello? Both solutions have rich support for photos and text. Airtable is more like a spreadsheet where Trello is oriented at task tracking ala kanban.
We use a Google form for each completed event and a Google sheet as a tracker for other events/initiatives.
We just link the photo link from Google drive.
Keeping good records of what you do is super important. It seems like you’re just asking about photos, but I’d like to encourage you to track everything. Off the top of my head, we tracked attendees at events, funds distributed to teams, wages paid to coaches, volunteer hours for our students (how many hours, what day, what job, what event, who did them, time in and out), and the overall number of events we attended. Photos are a great supplement to illustrate what you were doing, but the key words in the Impact award description are sustained and measurable - and numbers are by far the easiest way to measure what you’re doing.
For specific tools, we love spreadsheets (particularly Google Sheets). As you scale your programs, being able to import data, use SQL for processing data, javascript for automation, etc, are all super valuable. Google Sheets makes integrating forms super easy, and being able to collaborate, access the files from anywhere, and never worry about losing your documentation are all important for us.
Hey!! Missed your teams presentation at Champs because it conflicted with my volunteer shift. If you are cool sharing, I’d love to see what that spreadsheet looks like. I’d rather not reinvent the wheel with ours if we don’t have to.
We use Monday.com
Here is a link to a beta version of our system (it is not super tested so fingers crossed) their is an instruction document but step one is to just copy the entire folder. Hope it works for you! feel free to ask questions whether it be here, in the frc discord, or in the fma discord.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/11UG0-MoAccn1tr--Hl-rnhAgqLhWXMS-?usp=sharing
Thanks! It says I don’t have permission to view anything but the Google form. Is that right?
that wasn’t correct an it should now be fixed
Thanks!!!
Here’s what we use:
https://www.worbots4145.org/_files/ugd/355c3f_f035f0ce14ee4860a6131512728b2267.xlsx?dn=Outreach%20Logging%20Research.xlsx
This format allows us to provide event descriptions, purpose statements, and measured outcomes as events occur, which is super helpful. It also includes a space for a Google Drive link so that the files themselves are categorized within our team Master Folder, ensuring year-to-year retention of media.
Once it’s time for the Impact Submission, the columns that match the FIRST spreadsheet go into that, then any information we need to reference about an event or media we need to pull for the Documentation Form or the video are all in one place.
Really big binder. Only half joking
i # love monday.com
like photos from your outreach events and stuff? we use google photos for photos of outreach for impact stuff, monday.com to track work on impact/assign stuff and the first spreadsheet for tracking what events we did and things like that