Setting up your monitoring workflow for the first time
Before you read this article, make sure you're familiar with the monitoring workflow of Landscape in general. Here's a video to help.
There are few items which need to be set up before you begin monitoring with Landscape. They are:
- Create your monitoring form
- Build your report template
- Apply that form to the correct sites* & create monitoring tasks
*or just make sure that your form gets automatically attached to the correct visit types.
Once you're done, a monitor will be able to start a site visit and use the form you built automatically. When the site visit is over, they will generate the final monitoring report using the report function. The site visit will also be tracked against your total overall site visits for the year.
To quickly review how monitoring works in Landscape:
A monitor can fill out the form, take photos and add captions, and get a gps track with Landscape Mobile, and/or add this data to the site visit from the desktop. When the site visit is completed, the final .pdf report is generated using Landscape's report function.
What you need to do prior to the monitoring season is make sure the monitors all have access to the correct form and that they can generate and save the correct report.
1. Create your monitoring form
Go to Settings --> Work --> Forms (must be an administrator). From here you can build as many form templates as you need. We include a monitoring form with your account to help you understand how they work. Feel free to delete these if you don't need them, or modify it and use it as a guide. Most organizations have at least a 'Fee Monitoring Form' and a 'Easement Monitoring Form'.
The most important thing to remember when building your form is that you do not need to include questions that Landscape already knows the answer to, or that are already included as part of a site visit record. Questions you do not need to ask on your form therefore include: Monitor Name, Monitor Role, Site Visit Date, Site Visit Duration, Site Visit Summary, Site Visit Method, Landowner Name, Landowner Address, Property/Stewardship Site Name, Property/Stewardship Site Address. You only need to ask questions that pertain to that site visit specifically.
2. Build your report template
From the dashboard, go to Settings > Report Templates. An 'Annual Monitoring Report' report template is included in all accounts. You can edit this template directly, or (recommended) click on the check box next to it and click the 'copy' button to create a copy which you can then edit/experiment with, while still retaining the original in case you need to start over. Note that this report template is in the 'Site Visits and Other Work' category.
You can then add your own logo, delete the helper text, insert fields that you want to see, etc.. You can also apply filters to repeatable fields (say, to only display contact information for active contacts tagged as 'Landowner'), specify how your photos are sorted, and specify the map size, among other things. The default report template is really just to give you a good starting point. Note that the 'Forms' section of the report template acts only as a placeholder for the form you just built. You can specify the overall appearance of this section, but you won't see the actual form appear until you actually run the report from within a site visit record.
Building a report takes some trial and error. Have a site visit record (even just a test record will do) with a few photos in it that you can use to generate the report and see how it looks. You can then return to building the report, make some tweaks, and re-run the report on the test visit. It can help to have multiple tabs open for this process (one open to the report builder, and one to the site visit record).
3. Link your form to the correct records & create your monitoring tasks.
When you create the form in step one, you can choose to automatically link specific forms to specific kinds of work. For example, you could have a 'CE Monitoring Form' that automatically gets linked to any 'CE Monitoring Visit' that gets created. This is probably the easiest way to set up monitoring (it may involve you adding new site visit types via Settings > List Items > Work).
However, if you have more complex needs and want to take advantage of Landscape's ability to customize form templates for individual sites, then you'll want to manually link your forms. Forms linked manually can be added to from within the records that they're attached to. For example, you could customize a general 'CE Monitoring Form' to the terms of individual easements, or insert a question about particular ongoing issue on a preserve to that preserve's 'Fee Monitoring Form'.
By creating monitoring tasks, you can track your monitoring season and see what remains to be done. These tasks then repeat on a cycle you define, so they only need to be set up once.
Here's an article on how to link your forms to the correct records.
And here's an article on how to create your monitoring tasks.