Many programs encourage cross-center counseling, where a counselor in Center A, assists with clients located in Center B, C and D. If you want to see all activity by that counselor, you can restrict the definition and/or goal set to a single counselor while leaving the centers unrestricted. This would give you an overview of everything that one counselor has done across the entire network of centers.

But what if you are trying to determine all activity of all counselors in Center A across the entire network? You would not be able to restrict to just one center, because the counselors may have worked in other centers, nor would you be able to restrict to just one counselor, because you want to see everything done by all the counselors in a center.

In this FAQ, we'll provide an overview of how to set up a definition for a group of counselors and/or a goal set for a group of counselors who may have worked across a number of different centers.

• Creating a definition for multiple counselors
• Creating goal sets for multiple counselors
• The most important thing to remember

Creating a definition for multiple counselors

To learn more about definition records in general, you can refer to the FAQ titled: What is a scorecard definition record?. In this FAQ we will specifically address the settings required to generate a definition for more than one counselor.

To start, you will need to create a filter of counselors to be included. Presumably, you will want to include all counselors belonging to a particular center as shown below:

In the screenshot above, we are creating a counselor filter for all active counselors belonging to the Malibu Small Business Center. Keep in mind, that you may want to include inactive counselors in your filter if some of the inactive counselors were active during the course of the reporting period.

Once you have created the filter, be sure to Save it and provide it with a meaningful name:

Now we are ready to create the difinition for an existing scorecard. You can click the New Definition button from one of two places:

• You can click Manage|Scorecards|Definitions to see all your existing definitions and to create a New one.
• Alternatively, you can go to a scorecard layout, and from the layout you can click Add in the right hand "Scorecard Run Definition" panel.

Enter a Name for this definition. A default name will automatically appear but it is recommended that you change this name to something that describes your specific definition parameters so that it is easier to identify your definition later on.

Enter the dates as appropriate. By default, the Funding Source(s) and Sub-funding Source(s) fields displays "All" funding sources. If you would like to limit your scorecard to records from certain selected funding sources then you should specify the funding sources accordingly. When you restrict a scorecard's ouput to one or more funding sources, it has the following impact:

• Only client activity records (e.g. milestone, award, investment, etc.) and conference records that display one of the funding sources chosen are considered.
• For custom scorecards, only client records that display one of the funding sources chosen are considered. For system scorecards, this may not always hold true; it depends solely upon the specifications provided to us by your funding agency. You can find the exact calculations for built-in scorecards in their corresponding "Understanding the <scorecard name>" help files.

Since the scorecard that we are creating in this case, is designed to measure activity of multiple counselors across the entire network, we don't want to restrict the centers. Simply, choose "Select All" to include all the centers in the network (as shown in orange in the graphics below).

This is where it gets interesting, from the Additional Filtering settings, you can restrict the scorecard's output to the saved counselor filter (as shown in green in the graphics below):

When you restrict a scorecards output to a group of counselors, it has the following impact:

• Only client activity records (e.g. milestone, award, investment, etc.) that are assigned to the counselors are considered.
• Only conference records that have the counselors listed as the instructor are considered.
• For custom scorecards, only client records assigned to the counselors are considered. For system scorecards, this may not always hold true; it depends solely upon the specifications provided to us by your funding agency. You can find the exact calculations for built-in scorecards in their corresponding "Understanding the <scorecard name>" help files.

Note: If you intend to create goals for this definition record, it is recommended that you do not restrict the run parameters of the definition record to a counselor or group of counselors; rather, you should do that later from the goal record itself (as described below).

The Center field, at the bottom of the definition record, merely identifies the center where this definition is being created. It has no impact on the output. Click Save to save your edits.

With the definition parameters on the screen, click the "Run" link to see your scorecard results.

Creating goal sets for multiple counselors

If you haven't already, create a definition record for the scorecard that you would like to establish goals for. It is this definition record that you will assign your goals to. Do not restrict the definition record in any way. In other words, select ALL centers and do no apply any filters within the definition:

From the definition record, click the New Goals link, or if you already have a goal set that you want to copy, then go to the existing goal set record and click Copy.

Enter a descriptive name for your new goal record in the Goal Set Name field. From the first Center drop down field, identify the center that the new goal record belongs to. This center selection has no bearing on what centers are included in the result set. This center merely identifies who this goalset belongs to. Select the Definition parameters to the used for this goal set.

Now you must choose whether you are establishing goals for a particular counselor; a group of counselors; a particular center; or a group of centers, or an entire program. For purposes of this FAQ, you would choose "Counselor" and then select the group of counselors to be included:

Your goal set will include any and all records that have been entered into the system by the counselors listed. The only restrictions that will be applied are the date range and funding sources selected on the definition record. It is important that you did not restrict your definition record in any other way.

Next, for each calculated line item in the scorecard, enter the goal value for the cumulative period specified in the associated definition record. Click Save to save your new goal set record.

For a more general overview of goalsets, please refer to the FAQ titled: What is a scorecard goal set record?.

The most important thing to remember

The most important thing to remember, is that you cannot add up filtered scorecards together to get the network totals. In other words, if you create several definition records for different groups of counselors, you cannot add the results together to get the whole.

Lets take the example of woman-owned clients. If you run a scorecard for different groups of counselors, all of whom together make up all counselors in the network, then it would logically lead you to believe that you can add all the scorecard results together to get the network total, yet this is not necessarily true. Why not? Because some clients may be counseled by multiple counselors and thus would appear on the scorecard for each counselor. Adding all the clients together would overstate the actual total client count.

The only way to get accurate network-wide reports, is to generate a scorecard across the entire network.

Want more? Browse our extensive list of Neoserra FAQs.