Youth Exchange: Standard Operating Procedures

This page is written as procedures to follow, not features to learn. Each procedure is numbered, each step is one action, and each step states who may do it. If you want to understand why the system is built this way, see the training material instead. For screen-by-screen instructions, see the guide for the YEP Committee and Chair or Using the YEP Portal.

1. Adding a new student mid-year

A student who joins outside the annual roster import: for example, a late placement, or a replacement for a student whose exchange ended early.

1. Any Committee member who learns of the new student confirms the student's full name, host club and inbound or outbound direction with the club or the incoming coordinator.
2. The YEP Chair or an Inbound/Outbound Coordinator adds the student's record to the Youth Exchange site directly, rather than waiting for the next annual import.
3. The person adding the record leaves the Club Counsellor and YEO email fields blank if the placement is not yet confirmed. Do not guess.
4. The Club Counsellor or YEO, once confirmed is assigned using Procedure 2 below.

What could go wrong, and how you would notice. A student added mid-year is invisible to the district's safeguarding processes until their approvers are set, because travel and wellbeing reporting both depend on those fields. You would notice this if the student submits a travel request and it does not route anywhere, or if the student does not appear in the committee dashboard's student list a day or two after being added.

2. Assigning approvers to a student

The core task in the YEP Portal: setting a student's Club Counsellor, District YEO and Inbound Coordinator so travel requests route correctly.

1. Anyone with portal access to the student opens the YEP Portal and finds the student in their list.
2. The same person fills in the Club Counsellor field with the counsellor's group mailbox or role address, not a personal address.
3. The same person fills in the District YEO field by choosing from the list of the four YEO group mailboxes. The portal will not accept a typed personal address here.
4. The same person fills in the Inbound Coordinator field, if the student is inbound.
5. The same person saves the record and checks the readback the portal shows, confirming the values now held match what was entered.
6. If you do not know who the Club Counsellor is: do not leave the field set to a guess or an old name. Leave it blank, ask the host club directly, and return to this procedure once you have an answer. A blank field shows plainly as "Not set"; a wrong entry does not.

What could go wrong, and how you would notice. A field left blank routes nothing, and a field filled with a personal address stops routing the moment that person's role changes. You would notice a blank field by the "Not set" marker in the portal, and you would notice a wrong address by a travel request that never reaches the person who should be approving it.

3. Loading a new cohort

The annual bulk import of a new group of inbound or outbound students, done once per intake rather than one student at a time.

1. The YEP Chair or an Inbound/Outbound Coordinator prepares the cohort spreadsheet in the required format, per the YEP Roster Loading guide.
2. The same person runs the import and checks the preview screen's new, updated, unchanged and skipped counts before confirming.
3. The same person confirms the import.
4. The YEP Chair assigns Club Counsellor and YEO fields for each new student as they are confirmed, using Procedure 2.

The import never blanks a field that already holds a value. This means re-running the import, for example after correcting a spreadsheet error, is safe. It will not erase approver details someone has already typed in by hand.

What could go wrong, and how you would notice. If the spreadsheet has the wrong column mapped to the wrong field, the preview screen's counts will look unusual, for example far more "updated" rows than expected. Check the preview counts before confirming, not after.

4. Ending an exchange early

A student's exchange finishes before its planned end date, for any reason.

1. The YEP Chair or the relevant District YEO sets the student's record to reflect that the exchange has ended, using the state field on the student's record.
2. The same person does not delete the student's record. Records are never deleted.
3. The same person tells the student's Club Counsellor, the host club, and the District YEO if not already involved, that the exchange has ended.
4. The YEP Chair tells the YEPPER editors, so the student is no longer expected to submit further monthly reports.

What could go wrong, and how you would notice. If the record is deleted instead of marked ended, the exchange's history, including any safeguarding notes, is lost. If nobody is told, the student may keep receiving report reminders after leaving, or a wellbeing concern raised late may have nobody obviously responsible to follow it up. You would notice the first by an empty audit trail where one should exist, and the second by report reminders continuing to arrive for a student who has gone home.

5. Student changeover at the end of a cohort

Marking a cohort's students as returned while the next cohort is being loaded. Student cohorts turn over on exchange dates, roughly twelve months apart, and deliberately overlap: an incoming cohort is loaded before the outgoing cohort's last members have gone home.

1. The relevant Inbound/Outbound Coordinator marks each student as returned once their exchange has genuinely ended, using the same state field as Procedure 4, not by deleting the record.
2. The same person does this student by student, as each one actually returns, not on a single fixed date for the whole cohort.
3. The YEP Chair or coordinator loads the incoming cohort per Procedure 3, independently of how many outgoing students have been marked returned.

Do not treat this as a single changeover date. The two cohorts overlap on purpose, and a student who has not yet gone home still needs an active, correctly-assigned Club Counsellor and YEO. Marking a whole cohort returned on one date, before every student has actually left, is how a student ends up with no supervising officer.

What could go wrong, and how you would notice. A student marked returned while still on exchange loses routing for any new travel request. You would notice this if a still-present student's travel request has nowhere to go, or if a wellbeing report cannot find the student in the active list.

6. Committee changeover on 1 July

Committee roles turn over on 1 July every year. This is a different clock from student cohort turnover in Procedure 5, and confusing the two is exactly how a student ends up with no supervising officer. At committee changeover, only access changes. No email address changes, ever.

1. The outgoing YEP Chair, with district IT delegates youthexchange.chair@rotary9660.org.au to the incoming Chair and removes the outgoing Chair's delegation. The address itself does not change.
2. The outgoing YEP Chair, with district IT updates the delegation on each yeo.groupN@rotary9660.org.au mailbox where that group's YEO has changed. The address itself does not change.
3. The outgoing YEP Chair, with district IT updates the delegation on yepper@rotary9660.org.au where the YEPPER editors have changed. The address itself does not change.
4. District IT updates membership of the nine Entra area groups (the committee area groups, for example Youth Protection, the Inbound/Outbound Coordinator groups, and the YEO groups) to reflect who now holds each area.
5. District IT updates the YEO names shown in the travel form's dropdown, so a student submitting a new request sees the current YEO for their group.
6. The incoming YEP Chair checks the committee dashboard shows the expected set of students and that each area's access looks correct, before relying on it.

What could go wrong, and how you would notice. If a mailbox delegation is missed, the person who should now be reading it will not know a request or a report has arrived. You would notice this by an approval that sits unactioned past its normal notice period, or a student reporting they have heard nothing after submitting a request.

7. When a travel request has not moved

A travel request that has been waiting longer than seems reasonable.

1. The student, Club Counsellor or YEO who notices checks the status link the student was emailed, or asks the student to check it, to see who has approved so far and whose turn it is now.
2. Whoever is shown as the next approver is the person to follow up with directly, since approvers act from the link in their own email, not by signing in to the portal.
3. If the approver cannot be reached, for example because a role has changed hands and the mailbox delegation was missed, escalate to the YEP Chair, who can check and correct mailbox access per Procedure 6.

Approvers do not sign in to anything. There is no portal page an approver needs to check; the request only moves when the current approver clicks approve or decline in their emailed link.

What could go wrong, and how you would notice. A request can stall because a mailbox delegation was missed at changeover, not because anyone is being slow. You would notice this if the "whose turn it is" step points to a mailbox nobody currently reads.

8. When a Yepper report is overdue

A student's monthly Yepper report for a given month is overdue if it has not arrived by the 1st of the following month.

1. The YEP Chair and the YEPPER editors receive a digest on the 2nd of each month, at 9am Sydney time, listing any student who is overdue.
2. No digest is sent if nobody is overdue. A quiet month means every student is up to date. Do not treat the absence of a digest as a system failure.
3. The YEP Chair or a YEPPER editor, on receiving a digest, follows up directly with each overdue student's Club Counsellor or YEO.
4. The overdue student also receives their own reminder, separately from the digest, listing only the months they are personally missing.

What could go wrong, and how you would notice. If the digest itself stops arriving even in a month where a report is known to be missing, that is a real fault, not a quiet month, and should be reported to district IT. You would notice this by knowing independently that a report is missing (for example, a student mentions it) while no digest or reminder has arrived.