Using the Landscape Portal interface for volunteer monitoring
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Typical volunteer monitoring setup
Key Takeaways from this article:
- Portal users get limited access to your Landscape portfolio.
- Portal users can only see sites where they have been added as a Team Member.
- Portal users have no access to Tasks, even if those Tasks are assigned to them.
- Portal users must still log into the website if they are responsible for generating the monitoring report — that cannot be done from the mobile app.
The Portal Interface
The Portal interface is specifically designed to assist with volunteer monitoring. It gives volunteer monitors access to important site information and site visit details for sites to which they are assigned as team members, and prevents access to other data like the dashboard, portfolio, or data viewer. Portal interface does not affect how Landscape Mobile performs.
When adding a user, select 'Portal' as the user interface. This can also be changed after the user has been added.
Once you designate the user interface as 'Portal', you must assign that user as a Team Member to the sites you want them to have access to.
This is what a user sees from the portal view: A list of recent site visits to records to which they have been assigned. They can then navigate to the correct site visit by clicking on it.
From the site visit record, they can view record contact information, see notes, record details, and reports. They can run the monitoring report and edit the site visit data (form responses, photo captions, etc.) just as a regular user can, provided they have sufficient permissions.
Portal users have no access to tasks, and so can't navigate to or see tasks that are assigned to them. They also cannot see or interact with other work items such as Issues or Resources.
However, they can turn those layers on on the map and see information related to the geography stored with those items within their assigned records.
Typical volunteer monitoring setup
- Set your volunteer permissions and add your volunteer users. Assign these users with the Portal interface.
- Instruct your volunteers in your monitoring workflow from start to finish, including which parts of the process they are responsible for. Here is how the monitoring workflow is designed to work in Landscape, and here is how we recommend monitoring with the Landscape Mobile App.
- If your volunteers will be responsible for generating the annual monitoring report, make sure they know how to log onto the website and run a report from a site visit. It is important for volunteers to understand that syncing the mobile app alone does not create the annual monitoring report. If your staff will be responsible for that part of your workflow on behalf of the volunteers, ensure you have steps in place that make it easy for staff to understand which site visits they need to run reports for. A common solution is to use a View of All Site Visits, using the 'In Progress' status as an indication of which site visits might require a report:
