Because before any survey or dashboard, you need to know who is doing what, where, and in which context. Organisation setup, user roles, project configuration, and site structure are not admin overhead. They are the scaffolding that turns a tool into a learning infrastructure.

Not one person. Roles are designed so field teams, project officers, MEL leads, and managers each play a defined part. Project Creators, Field Agents, Reviewers, and Managers see different views and have different responsibilities, turning MEL from a solo task into a shared practice.

Typical roles include Manager, Project Creator, Organiser, Field Agent, and Viewer. • Assign by what each person needs to see and do. • Build in review permissions so work moves naturally from draft → review → approval. Your Account Manager will help make the first pass sensible and safe.

A project is the single, structured home for core context, so you stop piecing facts together from PDFs and emails. You capture: • Geography and scope (where and how it is defined) • Standards/frameworks it sits under • Governance & implementation (who decides, who delivers) • Land/conflict context, or in youth impact, the core problem and system This becomes the reference layer for reporting, risk, and design decisions.

A site is the unit where real nuance lives (e.g., a village, school cluster, district, or hub). For each site you add: • Demographics & population profile • Livelihoods/land use (or school/community context) • Vulnerable groups & nature of vulnerability • Ecological or conflict context where relevant Sites let you listen locally and still roll up to a coherent project story.

Start practical. Define the sites that are material to decisions and feasible to support. You can add more over time; each site carries its own stakeholders, Theory of Change, and context while remaining part of the same project.

Setup bakes in shared responsibility and a visible review trail. • Project Creators draft. • Reviewers comment in context and request changes. • Managers approve and lock when ready. No more invisible email chains; everything is traceable and linked to the module and version.

You build stakeholder maps and Theories of Change at site level so local dynamics are not averaged away. You can sample, collect, and analyse by site, then the platform aggregates across sites to show project-level trends. That is how we honour lived experience and tell a joined-up portfolio story.

No. The structure is built for scale without punishing localisation. Many sites can live under one project, so adding places and partners increases insight, not admin. Commercially, we price at the project level so serious, disaggregated listening stays viable.

By the end of setup you should have: • Your organisation created and team roles assigned. • Each project defined with a single coherent record of purpose and context. • Sites described well enough to understand who lives there, how they live, and what makes each site distinctive. With that foundation you are ready for Stakeholder Mapping → Theory of Change → Survey Design → Data Collection → Analysis & Storytelling.

Yes. Work-in-progress stays editable; once reviewed and approved, a module can be locked for integrity. You can version and update as reality shifts; maintaining a clear line of what changed, when, and why.

They help you: • Set up the organisation and assign roles/permissions sensibly. • Configure projects and sites, pulling in the right colleagues for geography, governance, land/conflict, or youth-system context. • Run working sessions for tricky steps and keep the review/approval flow moving, so setup becomes a shared knowledge base, not a bottleneck.

Context captured here becomes the starting point for: • Stakeholder lists and sampling frames • The Theory of Change structure • Survey design and consent flows • Risk scanning and watchpoints It also feeds dashboards and provenance, so every metric and story has a context you can point back to.

Yes. Setup + review / approval gives you one shared space to work through context together. Embedded chat and live audio / video keep conversations in the module, and comments persist—building a reusable, auditable memory for your team.