Best Practices

The Platform was designed for multi-site research projects to ensure that teams can streamline data collection by easily administering surveys, accessing data, and comparing data across groups. See below for a few best practices to optimize the team and administrator experience.

Considerations for Project Design and Team Roles

The Platform has two main administrative access levels. Before setting up a project, teams should decide which members will be Project Administrators (create base surveys and events, access all data) and which members will be Event Administrators (create and administer event surveys, access select event data).

Below are several scenarios teams may want to consider when setting up their project:

Our team has multiple members who will need to have access to Events and manage surveys. Is there a way to simplify the process of adding them as Event Administrators?

• One way to circumvent adding Alternate Administrators to each Event is to create a universal or service email account for your project (e.g. projectname@university.edu or projectname@gmail.com).

• When creating a new event, Project Administrators will enter the universal email address as the Event Administrator. Once the Event is created, multiple team members can log into the CIMER Portal with that email address to access and manage surveys across Events.

• It is important to note that the email address entered for the Event Administrator will be the email address from which users receive their survey invitation.

Our project will distribute surveys across multiple Events. Is there anything the Project Administrator should know about naming Events and Surveys?

• Events created in the Platform will be displayed in alphabetical order on the Survey Management page, regardless of when the Event was first created by the Project Administrator.

• For Events associated with a time point, the format "yyyy_mmdd" is recommended at the beginning of the Event Name (e.g. 2020_1201 CIMER Event). This nomenclature will ensure that all events appear chronologically on the Survey Management page.

• When downloading data for all Events within a Project Group Section, the dataset will display both the Event Name and the Survey Name. For Surveys associated with a time point, the format "yyyy_mmdd" is recommended at the beginning of the Survey Name (e.g. 2020_1201 Mentor Training Post Evaluation Survey).

More information on the CIMER Assessment Platform features and design can be found on the Overview and Setting up a New Project pages on the CIMER website. Users can submit questions and feedback related to this Google Site or the CIMER Assessment Platform via this Google Form.