Best Practices for Libraries

We are excited for your patrons to learn with us! Here is your Quickstart Guide to managing members in your Treehouse account.

If multiple staff members will be managing the account, you can use a shared email address for the Admin seat, which will allow equal access to oversee the day-to-day tasks with Treehouse. Contact your Client Success Manager to help you facilitate this. 

Treehouse uses a “seat” system where patrons will be assigned their own personal accounts. To start, it’s important to come up with a system so patrons can request a seat in your organization. This should include:

1. Adding an embedded form or Google Form where patrons can include their first & last name, library card number, and email address that links to an internal spreadsheet. Make it clear to patrons how active they need to be in order to keep their seat. For example, if they haven’t been active in the last 14 days, their seat will be disabled and they will have to re-request access. Here are some examples from other libraries:

   1. https://sfpl.libanswers.com/faq/224784

   2. https://tscpl.org/research/treehouse

2. Marketing Treehouse on the library website and sending targeted email campaigns using the library assets provided by your Client Success Manager. Look for an email titled Treehouse // Free Library Assets!

3. Using the internal spreadsheet generated by your form to add members to your Treehouse account. Detailed instructions can be found in our Knowledge Base under Member Management. Here you will also learn how to deactivate inactive members to free up more seats.

Deactivating inactive accounts is the most manual part of our current platform. There are two ways to do this. 

1. In the Members section under your My Org tab you can filter your patrons in two ways: Recent Activity under the Name drop-down, and Active under the All Statuses dropdown. This will allow you to easily see when folks were last active, and disable those who are past your predetermined time period.

2. Alternatively, you can run a report in the Activity section of the My Org tab. This will generate a report that can be exported as a CSV and then inactive members can be searched by name in the Members section and deactivated.
   Reporting: Monthly and Yearly Member Activity
   
   You can keep track of platform usage by setting monthly auto-generated reports, or by generating a report for a specific time period. This is done in My Org under the Activity tab.
   
   By choosing Click here to change your settings, you can generate monthly member activity reports that will send a sharable CSV file to your Owner Admin email.
   
   Sometimes you may want data for a specific time period, like for the quarter or the year. Select Type the drop-down menu, and then Member activity and choose your date range. When you hit the Generate button a sharable CSV file will be sent to your Owner Admin email.

If you need assistance using our platform please contact your Client Success Manager. We are glad to be a resource for you in this partnership!