Youth Exchange: Using the YEP Portal
Signing in, why you may see fewer students than a colleague, filling in a student's approvers, and what the portal does not do yet.
On this page
What the portal is, and where it is
The YEP Portal is where the committee fills in and checks each student's Club Counsellor, District YEO and Inbound Coordinator, so that a student's travel requests can route to the right approvers without anyone opening the Youth Exchange SharePoint site directly.
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 password for the portal.
When you are finished, use the sign out button on the page. This ends your session properly rather than leaving it signed in on a shared computer.
Why you may see fewer students than a colleague
This is the question the committee is most likely to ask, so it is worth being direct about: what you see in the portal follows the area or areas you hold on the committee, and seeing fewer students than someone else is correct behaviour, not a fault.
- A YEO sees only the students in their own group.
- Inbound and outbound coordinators see only students travelling in their own direction.
- Youth Protection sees every student, but only wellbeing information about them, not travel or approver details.
- The Chair sees everything.
If you hold more than one area, for example a YEO who is also on Youth Protection, you see the union of what each area grants. Nobody's access is a bug to report just because a colleague's screen shows more students than yours: check which area or areas you hold before assuming something is missing.
Youth Protection can read but not edit approvers
Youth Protection can open and read any student's record, including their wellbeing information, but cannot change who a student's Club Counsellor, YEO or Inbound Coordinator is.
This is deliberate. Seeing a child's wellbeing history is a different kind of authority from deciding who signs off their travel. The portal keeps those two separate on purpose, so a Youth Protection member cannot accidentally, or otherwise, redirect who approves a student's travel.
If you are signed in with only Youth Protection access, the portal shows the student list as read-only and tells you so plainly.
Filling in a student's approvers
For each student you can see, you can fill in or update:
- Club Counsellor
- District YEO
- Inbound Coordinator
A student missing one of these shows a clear "Not set" marker rather than a blank cell, so a gap is never mistaken for a deliberate blank.
The YEO field is always chosen from a list of the four YEO group mailboxes. You cannot type a personal address into it. This is the same reasoning behind the group mailboxes described in the guide for Club Counsellors and YEOs: a group mailbox keeps working across a handover, a personal address does not.
What a suggestion is
Sometimes a student's record already carries a YEO's first name, left over from an earlier import or note. When that happens, the portal may suggest the matching YEO group mailbox next to the field, along with the reason, for example that the record says "Stuart".
A suggestion only fills the field so you can look at it. It is not saved until you check it is correct and save the record yourself. If no first name is on the record, the portal will not guess: no suggestion is better than a wrong one.
What happens after you save
After you save a change, the portal reads the student's record straight back from where it is stored and shows you what the record actually now holds, rather than simply assuming your save worked.
If the readback matches what you saved, you will see the change listed plainly, for example District YEO: Not set -> Group 3.
This is a real problem, not a display glitch. Do not keep retrying. Report it to the district IT team so it can be investigated, and note which student and field were affected.
Every change is recorded
Every change made in the portal records who made it and when. This history is kept, not overwritten, so the committee can always see who last updated a student's approvers and when it happened.
What the portal does not do yet
This first version of the portal covers approvers only. The following are all still in their existing places, not in the portal:
- Travel requests. Approving and tracking travel still happens through the emailed approval links described in the guide for Club Counsellors and YEOs.
- Monthly reports. Yepper reports and wellbeing check-ins still go through their existing forms.
- Wellbeing records. These are not yet viewable or editable in the portal.
- The annual roster import. New cohorts are still loaded the way the guide for the YEP Committee and Chair describes.
- Changing who has access. Adding or removing someone from a committee area is still a district IT task, not something the portal lets a committee member do directly.
Assume any of these still work the old way unless a future update to this guide says otherwise.