14. Managing your development tracker

You’ll want to create your own workflows and standards for maintaining your development tracker. We’ve included many of ours throughout this guide, but you’ll need to create ones that work for your organization. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

• Who will be the point person, or project manager?
  • Someone should be responsible for knowing what pieces of the project need to be completed before launch and after.
• Who will do data research and entry?
  • Is this someone on your team, or multiple people? What level of Airtable access should they have?
• Who will edit records and get them ready to publish?
  • This should be someone other than whoever enters data.
• Who will train others in the processes, create documentation and maintain standards?
  • This may be the project manager or point person, but someone should be the go-to resource for how the tracker and its data are set up.
• Who will assign records?
  • If you are a small team, all records might be assigned to yourself or one person – will you still use the assignment feature to keep track?
• Who will actually publish records?
• Who will manage user tips?
• Who will handle technical issues with the site?

• When do you want to launch the tracker, and how much time will you need to put in weekly to hit that goal?
  • Setting up the blank Airtable base and template site through this guide will take you at least five hours, and possibly up to 20 if you don’t have coding experience.
  • You’ll need to do initial work to identify your data sources and determine how you want to structure your content.
  • Then, you can hopefully estimate how many records you’ll have in total and how long it will take to prepare each to publish.
  • Add in another five hours at least for testing and tweaking the site copy and design.
• After you launch the tracker, when will you update it?
  • Will you set aside a particular time or number of hours each week to add projects and address tips, add those tasks to other newsgathering workflows, set a number of records to be completed weekly and/or handle tips immediately?

• How will new records be added to the to-do list and assigned?
  • Will one person be responsible for gathering records, adding their basic information to the tracker (like name and address) in batches and assigning them to others?
  • Or will you not add records to the tracker until you are ready to complete them?
  • Will you use the assignment feature in Airtable, or another system?
• How will you track the progress of records?
  • Will you use Airtable’s record status feature to track when records are unassigned, incomplete and ready for review, or another system? Will you use automations or another system to make sure people are notified when they have a record to add, edit or publish?
• How will you avoid duplicating work or records?
  • Tip: You can make the first step for adding a new record be using Airtable’s search to make sure that the name or address does not already exist in your Projects table.
• How will you track your data sources?
  • Will you use a spreadsheet, Airtable table or another system?
  • How and when will you check sources that need to be manually reviewed for new data?
• How will you update records?
  • What system will you put in place to make sure older records are updated as needed, and what will be your threshold for when a record deserves updating?
  • Will you review old records at regular intervals, or rely on tips and reporting to identify needed changes?
  • Who can update records? Anyone on your team, just an editor or just the original person who entered them?
• How will you determine and create best practices and workflows for data entry and managing the tracker?
  • Will you create documentation, like FAQs or guides to your data collection practices and Airtable? (Feel free to copy and adapt anything in this toolkit.)
  • Will you hold trainings?
  • What will you do if someone working on the tracker moves to a new role or leaves your newsroom?

In earlier sections, we walked you through how the Tips and Contact Us tables in Airtable connect to the site and how you can set up automations so you'll be notified when you get new submissions.

User tip submission, as it's set up in the template tracker and as we’ve experienced with the Detroit Development Tracker, is a core function of the site. Hopefully, your audience will be enthusiastic and willing to collaborate with you on tracking development (more about how to foster that in the engagement section).

We recommend that your plans for managing the tracker include time and commitment to managing user-submitted tips. You should:

• Determine who will be responsible for reviewing tips.
• Implement a process to notify that person or people when new tips are submitted (through Airtable automations or another system).
• Use the Assigned to, Record status and Replied? fields in the Tips Airtable table (or another process) to track the status of submissions.
• Create an editorial process for vetting and reporting on tips.
  • Decide how you will handle tips that you can’t immediately verify.
  • Consider how you will use and credit user-submitted photos.
• Include record updating and adding new records via tips in your processes as well, as discussed above.

The contact form is a more standard feature, included in the site so you can receive general inquiries. (You can adjust this page text to include your own specifics.) You can use similar workflows as you use for tips management – automated notifications, assigning records in the Contact Us Airtable table, marking records as replied and resolved – to ensure you respond to all messages.

The next section discusses reader engagement and public outreach.