Youth Exchange: A Guide for the YEP Committee and Chair
Loading the roster, filling in the approver fields, the overdue Yepper digest, and what must change at changeover.
On this page
Loading the roster each year
Once a year, bring the new inbound or outbound cohort spreadsheet into the Youth Exchange site, rather than typing every student in by hand. Full instructions, including the .xlsx requirement and how to map columns, are on the YEP Roster Loading guide.
Filling in the approver fields
The roster import deliberately leaves the Club Counsellor and YEO email fields blank for every student. No spreadsheet the district produces contains this pairing, so it has to be typed in by hand, by someone who knows the actual placement, as it is confirmed.
A student's travel requests cannot be routed to the right approvers until their Club Counsellor and YEO email fields are both filled in on the Youth Exchange site. Fill these in as soon as each placement is confirmed, not just at the start of the year.
Use the group mailbox address for the role, in the form yeo.groupN@rotary9660.org.au, not a personal address. See the guide for Club Counsellors and YEOs for why.
The committee dashboard
The YEP Committee dashboard brings together travel requests, monthly Yepper reports and wellbeing reports for every student, so the committee can see at a glance who is up to date and who is not. It is at support.rotary9660.org.au/yep-admin.
Access is restricted to members of the D9660-Tool-YEPAdmins district security group. This is a committee tool: Club Counsellors and YEOs act through the links emailed to them and do not need dashboard access, and most will not have it.
The overdue Yepper digest
A student's monthly Yepper report covering a given month is overdue if it has not been received by the 1st of the following month: an April report is overdue from 2 May.
On the 2nd of each month, at 9am Sydney time, a digest is sent to the YEP Chair and to the YEPPER editors at yepper@rotary9660.org.au, but only if at least one report is overdue.
If nothing is overdue, no digest is sent. A quiet month means every student is up to date, not that the digest has stopped working.
Students who are overdue also receive their own reminder, listing only the months they personally are missing.
What must change at changeover
Everything that needs to change at a YEP changeover is a question of access, never of an address. The email addresses the system relies on, the group mailboxes, the chair mailbox, the editors mailbox, stay exactly the same year after year. What has to change is who is allowed into them.
Hand over each of these:
- youthexchange.chair@rotary9660.org.au: delegate the incoming Chair, and remove the outgoing Chair.
- Each yeo.groupN@rotary9660.org.au mailbox: update whenever that group's YEO changes, not only at the annual changeover.
- yepper@rotary9660.org.au: update whenever the YEPPER editors change.
- Membership of the D9660-Tool-YEPAdmins group: this controls who can open the committee dashboard.
- The YEO names shown in the dropdown on the travel form: these are currently held in the system's configuration, so updating them needs a district IT change rather than an edit the committee can make directly. This is known to be awkward, and is planned to move into a future YEP portal so the committee can edit it directly.
None of the email addresses above change at changeover. That is the entire point of using group and role mailboxes instead of personal ones. If anyone proposes changing an address as part of a handover, that is a sign the design has been misunderstood: what should change is who has access to it.
What this does not do
- It does not automatically update approver fields when a Club Counsellor or YEO handover happens partway through the year. Someone has to update the record.
- It does not verify that a group mailbox address is still monitored by anyone. That depends on the group's own membership being kept current.
- It does not carry role responsibilities across a changeover by itself. Confirm access and approver details are handed over, do not assume the system does it for you.
- It does not promise a turnaround time for any approval in the chain, including the YEP Chair's own step.