Update an existing form to use Standard Fields


Important

Upgrading forms that have existing responses needs to be done carefully to ensure that you achieve the result you desire.

Please review these instructions carefully.

Why would you upgrade your existing applications/forms to use Standard Fields?

A standard field reflects a key field/question for which you want to capture an answer on all or most of your applications across all programs run through SmartyGrants. Standard fields allow you to capture common information across applications, irrespective of what program or forms are used to capture that information.  This provides grantmakers with a means of developing common data schema for the grant information they capture about grants in SmartyGrants.  Learn more about what a standard fields

Upgrading your existing applications/forms will mean that you will be able to do the following:

  • Design report templates based on standard fields
    These reports can pull out the same information about applications regardless of the round or forms used. This saves you from needing to design a custom report template for round or form and manually compiling the details from multiple rounds into a single application.

  • Update the contents of standard fields
    The contents of submitted application or acquittal forms are always locked and cannot be edited. With Standard Fields you can correct the small errors or typos, or simplify the overly complex project description. The changes can be made to standard fields without affecting the contents of the original submitted form.  

How to update an existing form to use standard fields

Step 1: Edit the existing form(s)

When you planning on upgrading multiple forms that already contain responses, we strongly recommend that you upgrade your forms in the following order:

  • Application Forms

  • Acquittal Forms

  • Assessment Forms

  • Administration Forms

Step 2: Choose the question(s) to upgrade

Select the question in the form editor that you wish to upgrade to a standard field and then click on Change Type

You will then be presented with a list of compatible Standard Fields that are not already in use within that form (a Standard Field can only be used once within a form). Select the relevant Standard Field and and click on Change to Standard Field

The change to a standard field will be reflected in the question properties bar. Their will be a notation that the question is a (Standard Field), the question type will be changed to the name of the Standard Field and the question label will be locked.

You can repeat this step to upgrade other questions in your form to use Standard Fields

Step 3: Save and Review and Apply changes

As you progress upgrading your questions to standard fields you should be saving your progress. The following message will appear after you have changed your first question.

Once you have completed changing all of your questions to standard fields click on the Review & Apply button.

The Review and Apply Changes gives you an important summary of the impact of the changes you have made to your form and how they will affect applications and responses that rely on the form your are editing.  

Where your changes include updating questions to standard fields you are given two options (accessed through clicking the show more link) as to how application standard fields should be updated with existing responses to the questions in the form. An applications existing standard fields can be:

  • Overwritten:  Any response to a standard field will be overwritten with the response to the question in form, except where the response to the form question is blank.

  • Filled if blank: The response to a standard field will only be updated, if the standard field is currently blank and there is a response to the question in the form.

To view the impact of your choices you can generate a spreadsheet showing the changes, by clicking on Generate Spreadsheet and once the spreadsheet is ready Download.  This spreadsheet will demonstrate to you what will happen to response to the question and to standard fields if you apply the changes. Refer to the screenshot below for an explanation of the spreadsheet.

Please also refer to Rules around updating standard fields when updating your standard fields.

Choosing 'Fill Blanks' for assessment / administration forms

When updating an assessment or administrator form there is a risk of an undesirable result if you choose Fill Blanks, where the assessment form contains a response to a standard field, which differs from that in the Standard Field.

An example

The Project Title standard field of an application already reads "Cats rule the world", as it has previously been populated by change the project title in an old application form to use standard fields.

There exists an administration form with the single question Project Title. A grantmaker had previously recorded an amended project title for the application in this example. In this case the grantmaker had recorded a new project title of "Cats like to think they rule the world". The grantmaker does not submit this administration form, but leaves it 'open'.

The grantmaker edits the administration form and changes the 'Project Title' question to the Standard Field 'Project Title'. On the review and apply screen they choose to only Fill Blanks for the Project Title question and clicks Apply Changes. As soon as the changes are applied the Project Title standard field will continue to read "Cats rule the world"; however, the contents of the administration form will also now read "Cats rule the world" and the previous project title stored in the administration form will be lost.

This will happen because the contents of open assessment and administration forms are always kept in sync with the standard field for an application. In this case because the grantmaker changed the Project Title question to the standard field Project Title, SmartyGrants correctly scanned all existing 'open' responses to the administration form and ensured that they were in sync with standard field. In the case of the application with the administration form containing the responses "Cats like to think they rule the world", SmartyGrants would see that this is not the same as the standard field Project Title and would overwrite it with the title "Cats rule the world".

To avoid this scenario happening and data being potentially lost you should consider:

  • Submitting all copies of an administration/assessment responses to a form before changing the form to use standard fields.

  • Choose the Overwrite option so that the standard field always reflects what has been recorded in the Assessment/Administration form. Overwriting a standard field is typically the right action to take when updating an administration/assessment form as these forms are added after the submission of the application form and generally contain the more up to date information for a standard field.

Update a choice question to use Standard Fields

Upgrading an existing choice question to a standard field is a little more complex then upgrading other questions to a standard field, because you need to create a choice list for your standard field prior to upgrading your form. When you change the choice question in your form you will be asked to map the existing choices for your question to match the choices you have available in your standard field.

Below is an example of upgrading the question Age Group (shown below) to be a standard field.

Step 1: Create a choice list 

You must first create a choice list that holds all of the values you will want accessible under your standard field. This will generally correspond with the choices available in your form; however, if you are updating a number of forms to use the same standard field you might find that the choices in the form vary. For example if you had a choice list relating to Australian states, some forms might refer to 'New South Wales' and others might refer to 'NSW', you will need to decide what the consolidate list of choices should be an then create the corresponding choice list. 

See here for a detailed instructions on creating a choice list

For this example we will create a choice list with the following values.

Step 2: Create a standard field

Now that the choice list exists we can create a standard field which uses this choice list. The standard field must be of the type single choice or multiple choice.

When creating the field, make sure you select the choice list you just created. In this example it would be Age Group

See here for more details on how to create a standard field

Step 3: Edit the existing form and choose the question to upgrade

Now that the standard field is available we can begin the upgrade process.

Select the question you wish to update to a standard field and then click Change Type

You will then be presented with a list of compatible Standard Fields, including the new Standard Field Age Group you created in Step 2.  Select the relevant Standard Field and and click on Change to Standard Field

Step 4: Mapping existing choices to the standard field

You will now need to map existing choices in your form to the choices available for the standard field you have selected.

It is important that you get this step right as you are unable to undo these changes once they are made.

On the left hand side of the popup you will be presented with all of the choices that are currently available in your form. You will then need to select the corresponding New Choice for each of these existing choices. The choices available for selection correspond to the choices you created under Step 1.

When you have completed the mapping click Confirm

Missing a choice to map onto?

If you discover that you need to add a choice to the standard field, you should click the Cancel button and then go to Settings > Choice Lists and add the choice to the relevant choice list and then continue from Step 3 above.


Ironing out inconsistency across forms

Mapping existing choices give you the chance to iron out slight variations in choices across forms. For example if you had a choice list relating to Australian states, some forms might refer to 'New South Wales' and others might refer to 'NSW'. When upgrading questions you will be able gain consistency in the way you refer to choices. 

Step 5: Save and Review and Apply changes

As you progress upgrading your questions to standard fields you should be saving your progress. The following message will appear after you have changed your first question.

Once you have completed changing all of your questions to standard fields click on the Review & Apply button.

The Review and Apply Changes gives you an important summary of the impact of the changes you have made to your form and how they will affect applications and responses that rely on the form your are editing.  

Where your changes include updating questions to standard fields you are given two options (accessed through clicking the show more link) as to how application standard fields should be updated with existing responses to the questions in the form. An applications existing standard fields can be:

  • Overwritten:  Any response to a standard field will be overwritten with the response to the question in form, except where the response to the form question is blank.

  • Filled if blank: The response to a standard field will only be updated, if the standard field is currently blank and there is a response to the question in the form.

To view the impact of your choices you can generate a spreadsheet showing the changes, by clicking on Generate Spreadsheet and once the spreadsheet is ready Download.  This spreadsheet will demonstrate to you what will happen to response to the question and to standard fields if you apply the changes. Refer to the screenshot below for an explanation of the spreadsheet.

Please also refer to Rules around updating standard fields when updating your standard fields.

In this example we are going to use to Fill Blanks.

Clicking on the Generate Spreadsheet button and then Download presents us with the following summary of the changes.

Looking at an individual row from this spreadsheet, for example DDA14-05 we can determine the following information from columns F and G

  • Current response stored in form: Adults (26-59)

  • Current standard field response: <blank>

This tells us that there is currently no response to the standard field Age Group for the application DDA14-05, which makes sense as we just created the standard field; however, there is a response to the question Age Group in the form we are upgrading and that response is Adults (26-59).

Looking at row K we see that:

  • Standard Field Response & All Open Assessment & Admin Forms: Adults (26-59)

This tells us what the value of the standard field will be, and also the response this question if we apply the changes. In this case you can clearly see that the value currently stored in the form would correspond with the value that would selected for the standard field.

It would be advisable to go through the other rows in the spreadsheet and confirm that the choices in the form (column F) correspond with you expect in column K.

If this is the case then close the Spreadsheet and click Apply Changes in SmartyGrants.

If you identify a problem, it would probably be best to click Undo Changes and to start the process again by either adding additional choices and/or redoing the mapping of existing choices Step 3 and Step 4 above.

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