Youth Exchange: Using the YEP Portal

What the portal is, and where it is

The YEP Portal is the one place the Youth Exchange committee works. It holds every student, every travel request, every monthly Yepper report, every wellbeing contact and every submitted form, and it is where the committee approves travel, updates records, raises consent forms and sets district policy for the programme.

It is at yep.rotary9660.org.au/youth-exchange/.

You should not need to open the Youth Exchange SharePoint site directly to do your role. If you find yourself doing that, tell the district IT team, because it means something is missing from the portal.

Signing in and signing out

Sign in with your Rotary district account, the same one you use for Outlook and Teams. There is no separate portal password.

Across the top of the page you will see your name and the area or areas you hold, for example "YEO Group 3" or "Youth Exchange Chair". That line is worth a glance whenever something is not where you expect it, because what the portal shows you follows directly from it.

When you are finished, use the sign out button on the page rather than just closing the tab. That properly ends your session, which matters on a shared or family computer.

Why you may see fewer tabs or students than a colleague

This is the question the committee asks most, so it is worth being direct: seeing less than a colleague is correct behaviour, not a fault.

The portal works on two separate questions. Which students you can see, and what kind of information you can see about them. They are not the same question, and holding one does not imply the other.

Two of these are worth understanding rather than just reading.

Youth Protection sees every student, but only their wellbeing information. No travel, no reports, and no ability to change who approves a student's travel. That is deliberate: seeing a child's wellbeing history is a different kind of authority from deciding who signs off their travel, and the portal keeps them apart on purpose.

Risk Management sees every student, but only travel. Not wellbeing, not reports.

If you hold more than one area, for example a YEO who also sits on Youth Protection, you get the sum of both: the wider set of students, and both sets of information.

Moving around, and getting back

The tabs across the top switch between the main screens. Within a screen, opening a student's record or the roster importer takes you a level deeper.

Every deeper screen has a way back: a breadcrumb trail at the top and a back link at the bottom. Use those rather than the browser's back button where you can, because they always return you to the screen you actually came from.

Your place in the portal is kept in the web address, so you can bookmark a particular student's record or send a colleague a link straight to it. They will still need to sign in, and they will still only see it if their own areas allow it.

Searching and sorting any table

Every table in the portal can be sorted and searched, including students, travel, forms, reports and wellbeing.

To sort, click a column heading. Click it again to reverse the order. An arrow on the heading shows which column is sorting and which way.

To search, use the box above the table. It appears on any table with five or more rows. It matches across every column at once, so you can type a country, a club, a level or a name without knowing which column holds it. It tells you how many rows matched, so an empty result is never mistaken for a screen that failed to load.

Sorting and searching only change what you are looking at. They change nothing about the records, and nobody else's screen is affected.

The Students tab

This is the portal's home screen. It lists every student you can see, with their direction, YEO group, clubs, exchange dates and whether they have been flagged for attention.

The District YEO column shows who the YEO is, by name, rather than the group mailbox address. A committee member scanning the list wants the person, not the address the approvals happen to route through.

Click a student's name to open their full record. That record is the single place where everything about that student comes together, and most of what you will do day to day starts there.

If you hold the roster right, you will also see two controls above the list:

• Add a student, for one student arriving outside the usual annual intake.
• Import a roster, for loading a whole year at once.

Both are described below.

A student's record, in full

Clicking a student opens everything the portal holds about them, in one screen, arranged in sections. Which sections appear depends on your own areas, and the record tells you which ones you are being shown rather than leaving you to guess from an empty space.

• Needs attention, if the student has been flagged. This appears first, above everything else, so somebody who opened the record for an unrelated reason still sees that the committee has an open concern.
• The student: name, email, direction, YEO group, status, host and sponsor clubs, country, host district, and the exchange start and end dates.
• Approvers: Club Counsellor and their email, District YEO group, and Inbound Coordinator and their email.
• Rules and Conditions: whether the consent has been raised, who has signed, whether images may be used, and a link to the signed PDF once it is complete.
• Travel: every travel request for this student, if you hold the travel right.
• Monthly reports: which months this student owes a Yepper and which have arrived, if you hold the reports right.
• Wellbeing: every wellbeing contact recorded for them, if you hold the wellbeing right.

Anything not filled in shows a clear Not set marker rather than an empty cell, so a gap is never mistaken for a deliberate blank.

Editing a student

On a student's record, press Edit. This opens the whole record for editing, not one field at a time. You can change:

• Full name, student email, direction, status and cohort
• Exchange start and exchange end dates
• Sponsor club, host club, country and host district
• Club Counsellor and their email
• District YEO group and the YEO's name
• Inbound Coordinator and their email

Fill in what you need and save. You do not have to complete fields you do not know.

The exchange dates are worth getting right. They decide which months the student is accountable for a monthly Yepper report. A student with no dates cannot be chased accurately, and one with wrong dates will be chased for the wrong months.

The District YEO is always chosen from a list of the four YEO group mailboxes. You cannot type a personal address, and the portal will refuse one if you try. A group mailbox keeps working when a YEO hands over; a personal address stops working the day they do. The YEO's name is filled in for you from the district setting for that group, so nobody retypes it per student.

Adding a student's photo

On a student's record, press Add a photo, or Change photo if there is already one. Choose a JPEG or PNG from your computer.

The photo is stored on the district's SharePoint alongside the rest of the Youth Exchange records, not in the portal itself, so it lives with everything else about that student and is covered by the same retention and backup as the rest of the programme's files.

Flagging a student for attention

On a student's record, press Flag for attention and type the reason.

There is no separate tickbox, and that is deliberate: the note is the flag. A student cannot be flagged without a recorded reason, and clearing the text clears the flag. A bare warning marker with no explanation tells the next person nothing except that somebody was worried once.

A flagged student shows the reason at the top of their record and is marked in the student list, so the flag is visible whether somebody came looking for it or not.

To remove it, press Change or clear this and clear the text.

The Rules and Conditions consent

The LTEP Program Rules and Conditions is signed by the student and their parents or guardians. The portal now runs it end to end, so it no longer needs printing, signing and scanning.

Raising it

On the student's record, under Rules and Conditions, press Raise the consent form. You will be asked for:

• The applicant's full legal name and email address. Both required.
• Parent or Legal Guardian #1: full legal name and email address. Both required.
• Parent or Legal Guardian #2: name and email. Optional, for the many families where there is only one guardian to sign.

Each person is emailed their own private signing link. Nobody can sign on anybody else's behalf, and it does not matter who goes first.

What the family sees

They open the link, with no sign-in and no account, and are asked two separate questions:

1. Do they agree to the programme's rules and conditions?
2. Do they consent to Rotary using the student's image and recordings in newsletters, websites and social media?

These are separate decisions and the form says so plainly. A family can agree to the rules and refuse the photographs. Both answers are recorded exactly as given.

Typing a full legal name and pressing Sign is the electronic signature, which the Rules and Conditions document accepts in place of ink on paper. The date and time are recorded automatically.

What you see

The student's record shows whether the consent is complete, who has signed, who is still outstanding, and the image answer stated separately and explicitly.

The signed document

Once the last required signatory signs, the portal produces the signed document as a PDF and files it to the Youth Exchange SharePoint, under YEP Forms/Rules and Conditions. A link to it appears on the student's record.

The PDF prints each person's answers in full words, including a refusal of image consent with its own "do not publish" instruction, so nobody reading it later has to interpret a tick or a blank.

The Child Safe Code of Conduct

Every student's record shows whether their Child Safe Code of Conduct is on file, with the date and a link to the signed form.

The Code of Conduct is a Youth Protection form, not a Youth Exchange one. The same form covers RYPEN, RYLA, NYSF, Public Speaking and Youth Exchange, and it is signed by Rotarians and volunteers as well as students. The portal reads the Youth Protection register to answer one question: is this student's Code of Conduct done?

To send it, use the Send button on the student's record. It fills in their email address for you. You can also open the form yourself from the same place.

The record shows one of three things, and the third is not the same as the second:

• Signed, with the date and a link to the form.
• Not on file, meaning no Youth Exchange Code of Conduct has been submitted for this student.
• Could not be checked, meaning the Youth Protection register was unreachable, or the student has no email address on their record so nothing can be matched to them. This is not the same as "not signed", and it should not be treated as one.

The portal never writes to the Youth Protection register. Those records belong to Youth Protection, and corrections to them go through that committee.

Adding one student by hand

For a student who arrives outside the usual annual intake, or a record that needs creating on its own, press Add a student on the Students tab.

Only two things are required: a full name and a direction, Inbound or Outbound. Everything else can be filled in later from their record.

You can also set, at the same time: YEO group, student email, host club, sponsor club, the exchange start and end dates, and the Club Counsellor's name and email.

The direction must be exactly Inbound or Outbound, because every rule about who can see a student keys on it. A student with the wrong direction becomes invisible to the coordinator who should be looking after them, so the portal refuses anything else rather than letting it through to be discovered later.

Importing a whole year's roster

For a full cohort, press Import a roster on the Students tab. The importer opens inside the portal.

It works in steps: point it at the spreadsheet, choose the sheet, then preview every change it proposes to make. Nothing is written until you have seen exactly what will change and confirmed it.

You can also open the importer in its own tab if you would rather have the full width for a large preview.

The Travel tab

Every travel request for the students you can see, in one table: student, level, destination, departure date, notice, which approver it is waiting on, and its status.

The Notice column shows how many days remain before departure and what district policy requires, for example 9 days (needs 14). A request with less notice than policy requires is marked in red. The required figure comes from the district Settings, so the flag and the policy can never disagree.

The count above the table tells you how many requests are open and how many are short of notice.

Approving, declining and reopening

• Approve records your approval and moves the request to the next approver.
• Decline asks you why. The reason is required: the student and everyone who has already approved are told, and a decline with no reason is not a record anybody can act on.
• Reopen appears on a declined request, and also asks why. It returns the request to the approval chain rather than deleting the decline, so the history shows both.

A completed request shows a link to its approval-record PDF.

Correcting a travel request

Sometimes a student submits a request with a wrong date, destination or set of details, and the answer is not to decline the whole thing and make them start again.

On a student's record, open the travel request and press to correct it. You can amend the travel details, including dates, destination, accommodation, transport and insurance details.

Approvals already given are kept, and the correction is recorded in the approval history with your name, so everybody can see what changed and who changed it. Only fields you actually change are recorded as changed.

The Reports tab

A grid: one row per student, one column per month, showing whether that student's monthly Yepper report has arrived.

A cell turns red once it is past due and nothing has arrived. The due day is district policy and is set on the Settings tab, so if you want to change when a report counts as late, change it there rather than asking students to work to a different date informally.

Only the months a student was actually on exchange are counted, taken from their exchange start and end dates. A student is never marked overdue for a month before they left or after they came home.

The portal tells you how many reports are overdue, and the monthly digest and the automatic student reminders already chase them. You do not have to.

Chasing one student now

Where a student has an overdue report, their row has a Remind button. It emails that student straight away, without waiting for the next monthly run. Use it when you have just spoken to a student, or when something needs chasing between runs.

It sends the same email the automated reminder sends, so a student never receives two differently worded chases and has to work out which one is official.

The Wellbeing tab

Every wellbeing contact recorded for the students you can see: the student, the contact date, the type of contact, who completed it, whether it was escalated, and a link to the report itself.

Contacts that could not be matched to a student

Below the main table you may see a second list of contacts that name a student who is not on the roster, or whose name matches more than one student.

These are deliberately not attributed to anybody. The portal will not guess, because attributing a safeguarding contact to the wrong child is worse than attributing it to nobody at all. The list tells you why each one did not match.

You have two ways to resolve them:

1. Correct the name on the roster or on the form, and the contact will move into the main table by itself.
2. Assign it to a student using the button on the row, when you can see what the automatic match could not, for example a married name, a nickname or a misspelling.

Assigning only ever resolves a contact that belongs to nobody. The portal will not let you move a contact that is already attributed to a student: resolving an unattributed record and re-pointing an attributed one are very different acts, and only the first belongs in a portal.

The Forms tab

Two things live here.

The forms themselves, as links you can send to students, parents and approvers. None of them need a sign-in. Use these rather than keeping your own copies of the addresses, because these come from the system and cannot go stale.

Every form submission for the students you can see, of every kind, in one list: travel requests, monthly Yeppers, wellbeing contacts and consents, with a link to each one's PDF where there is one.

The list names which kinds it is covering, based on your own areas, so an absence is never mistaken for "nothing was submitted". If you hold only the travel right, it says so, rather than showing you a short list that looks complete.

Sending a form to somebody

Each form has a Send button. Press it, type the email address, add a short note if you want to, and send. You can send to a few addresses at once by separating them with commas.

The recipient gets the form's link in an email from the district, along with your note and your name, so they can see who asked and reply if they were not expecting it. They do not need to sign in to fill it in.

The Settings tab

District policy for the Youth Exchange Program. These take effect immediately, for every form and every reminder, so a change here changes what students and approvers actually experience.

• Minimum notice for travel, by level. Three separate settings, one each for Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 travel. These are what the Travel tab measures a request's notice against.
• The day of the following month a monthly Yepper report is due. This is what turns a cell red on the Reports tab.
• The four YEO groups: each group's display name, and who currently holds it. The holder's name is what fills in automatically when a student is added to that group, and what the student list shows in the District YEO column.

Keeping the YEO holder up to date on this screen is the single change that most reduces retyping elsewhere. Set it once at changeover and every student added afterwards gets the right name without anybody thinking about it.

The Access tab

Visible to the YEP Chair and the District Governor only. It shows who currently holds each committee area, and lets you add and remove people.

To add somebody, type their district email address and press the add button for that area. To remove somebody, press Remove on their row.

Every change is recorded and emailed to the district IT team.

Every change is recorded

Every change made in the portal records who made it and when, and that history is kept rather than overwritten.

That applies to editing a student, correcting a travel request, approving or declining, assigning a wellbeing contact, changing a district setting and changing who holds an area. The committee can always see who last changed something and when.

After you save, the portal reads the record straight back from where it is stored and shows you what it actually now holds, rather than assuming the save worked. A successful change is reported plainly, for example District YEO: Not set -> Group 3.

When something looks wrong

If you see fewer students or fewer tabs than a colleague, check the areas line at the top of the page first. That is almost always the answer, and it is the system working correctly.

If the portal says a record does not hold what you just saved, that is a real problem, not a display glitch. Do not keep retrying. Note which student and which field, and tell the district IT team.

If a travel request or a form submission is missing, look for the portal's own note about withheld records. It will tell you how many were not shown and why, which is usually a name or email that does not match the roster.

If a wellbeing contact is sitting in the unmatched list, that is the portal refusing to guess, not a failure. Correct the name or assign it deliberately.

If your own access is genuinely wrong, ask the YEP Chair, who can correct it on the Access tab. Only the Chair and District IT Support areas need to go to district IT.

What the portal still does not do

Being straight about the edges, so nobody waits on something that is not coming:

• The Child Safe Code of Conduct and the medication log are not in the portal. They are still handled the way they always have been. The Code of Conduct is signed by Rotarians and volunteers rather than students, so it sits closer to Youth Protection than to Youth Exchange.
• STEP applications are not raised in the portal. They arrive as completed applications from the online intake, not as a district form, so there is nothing for the portal to send out.
• Adding a YEO to their group mailbox is still a district IT task, as described above.
• The portal does not send a student their travel form. Students still start a travel request from the form link, which you can copy from the Forms tab.

Assume anything not described on this page still works the way the other Youth Exchange guides describe it.