Making Changes to Advisory Board Membership
Advisory boards can often be undergoing changes to membership and management. Any changes made to the advisory board requires changes to the database on the advisory boards. Therefore, it is expected that Extension liaisons report any advisory board changes to the Extension Data Analyst within a day or two. When reporting changes, the Extension liaison should email the Data Analyst using the spreadsheet template below.
advisory board changes template
The first column in the spreadsheet is used to indicate which kind of change is made to the advisory board, with three options available:
- Add - indicates a new member is being added to the advisory board.
- Remove - indicates a current member is being removed from the advisory board.
- Update - indicates that the information in one or more columns is being changed for a current member.
Below is an example of changes that could be sent to the Data Analyst.
As can be seen from the above example, a submission to the Data Analyst can include multiple changes, with a row for each specific change. Additionally:
- An "Add" should include the members' name (last, first), email, board name, position in the board (if applicable), and their REG data. REG data should be collected immediately as a new member is added to the board as it is part of the registration process. For information on how to collect REG data, see the "Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Data (REG)" section below.
- A "Remove" should include the name, email, and group of the member. This is to avoid accidentally removing information for another board member with the same name. Any other information for the specified member will also be removed.
- An "Update" should include the name, email, and group of the member. This is to avoid accidentally removing information for another board member with the same name. Additional columns should be filled out only for column(s) with entries being changed to the new value in the additional column(s).
- Since the group has to be specified, an Extension member can include changes for more than one board, if applicable.
Other changes made to advisory boards should also be reported to the Data Analyst, which include creating a new advisory board, discontinuing an advisory board, or a change to a new Extension liaison. For these changes, simply email the Data Analyst with this information so they can document these changes in the advisory board database. A template is not required for submitting these changes.
Development, Implementation, and History
Our indicators were initially based off a set of indicators being used by UF/IFAS Extension. This initial list then went through a multi-stage feedback and revision process, which is outlined in the image below:
In summer/fall 2024, Extension's Data Analyst and Evaluation Specialist will meet with Extension professionals to receive feedback on the indicators, which may lead to changes in the indicators for the 2025 reporting cycle.
Reporting and Revisions Timeline
This timeline shows all the steps involved in the reporting and revisions of the statewide indicators. Extension professionals are directly involved in the Indicator Feedback Meetings and Reporting on the Indicators Survey. Whereas the other steps are the responsibility of the Extension Evaluation Specialist and Data Analyst.
Data Collection and Management
UConn Extension does not have requirements for how Extension professionals store and manage their indicator data during the year- only that reported indicator data meet specific requirements when submitting the data to the indicator survey. Here are some recommendations that are intended to make the process more straightforward and easier:
Data Archive
It is recommended that you keep an archive of your past Extension work. This is helpful because it provides an organized way of storing one's records which can increase data quality (e.g., accuracy, contextual information) and ease of access in the future (e.g., summarizing past work, seeing past work with same client, etc.). Such an archive should be hosted on a cloud-service to ensure there is a back-up and the ability to access the archive through multiple devices. UConn provides access to OneDrive and SharePoint as options. On a cloud-service, one should create a dedicated folder to serve as their data archive, which includes a folder for storing direct evidence of their work, a dataset that lists their work with relevant information, and a dataset that summarizes their work in relation to the statewide indicators. Here is an example of such a folder:
Extension Work Records
This folder should serve to store all direct evidence of one's Extension work. This is important in the event that someone ever needs to provide evidence for auditing purposes or needs access to that information for future work. Direct evidence of work can include a large variety of files, like emails, receipts, meeting recordings, post-meeting notes, participant surveys, sign-in sheets, and more. And depending on one's work, they may accumulate many files that can lead to a disorganized folder. So it is recommended that this folder has a series of sub-folders that are used to organize all the files, like according to month of the year.
And in each of the sub-folders, all relevant files should be listed with detailed titles for easy identification. This way, one could easily determine the contents of the file and quickly identify which file they may need at a given time.
Extension Work Records Dataset
In the the data archives folder should also be an excel spreadsheet which summarizes all the work evidence one has stored in the sub-folders of the Extension Work Records folder. This spreadsheet can include the date of the work (for contextual information & sorting), a description of the work, additional relevant information (activity, client), and a list of the files associated with the work. Therefore, if a funder requested evidence of a funded work carried out several months prior, using this spreadsheet one could easily identify the day the activity was carried out, whom received the work/benefit, and which files (of many) in the archive contain additional information about the work (if needed).
Statewide Indicators Dataset
Since the above Extension Work Records Dataset contains information on work applicable to the statewide indicators, one could read through the whole dataset to aggregate their data, across the whole previous year, when reporting on the statewide indicators survey. However, it may be easier and more manageable if one were to aggregate this information occasionally throughout the year. To help with this, we created a Statewide Indicators Tracker that allows one to enter the relevant data for each indicator across each month of the year, which then aggregates the data for the whole year in a separate tab. Additionally, one can change whether an indicator is applicable to them or not (by changing the 'Applicable' value to No and activitate the filter button on the header cell), which will then have the spreadsheet list only the indicators applicable to their work. Then, when it is time to report on the indicators survey, one can easily just copy the aggregated values for the relevant indicators from the aggregate tab and enter the values into the survey.
This serves as the current recommendation for collecting and managing data for the statewide indicators. Of course, this recommendation still requires work and time from the Extension professional. But we will continue to pursue additional methods and platforms in the future to reduce Extension professionals' time towards record-keeping while ensuring data quality and ease of access.
