It’s a wrap! A guide to updating your dashboard

Whether you’re an awarded community or working towards your award…telling us the amazing work you are doing is really important.

We know the dashboard isn’t perfect, which we are working hard on, but it is such a valuable tool. Without it we would just be guessing at the reach of the plastic free movement and the work you all do.

Using the dashboard, we can see the impact of your campaign locally, and build a picture of the success of the national movement you are all part of. We can use that data to push for policy change, plan ahead and drive plastic free reduction across the UK. With the dashboard information we can really see who the campaign has reached, where we need to improve and most importantly how we can help and support you.

Here’s our top tips for updating your dashboard and saving time:

1. Save time on uploads

We only need documents of your steering group meetings and council motions. Don’t worry too much about PDFs or photos of community pledges or evidence of events. We do love to see photos, but if you have limited time, just the details of your actions is great. If you have any great photos you would like to add to our image bank and have relevant permissions for them, you can email these to us in one go if that’s quicker than uploading.

2.Save time on descriptions

We don’t need loads of detail to approve your submissions, you can keep descriptions in Events and Allies uploads short and sweet, especially if you have limited time.

3.Businesses

You might have businesses that are nearly there with the Champion award, but are busy with the run up to Christmas. If you know what work they doing, you can edit your businesses item uploads for them, helping them reach their award … and you achieve your objective quicker.

4.Saving and Submitting

Make sure when you save each section, you also click ‘submit’ on the objective after, this notifies us to look over and approve your submission.

5. Having dashboard issues?

If you’re having problems uploading, saving, submitting or logging on, we want to help. Knowing issues that you might be having also enables us to work with our website developers to improve the site. You can call us or give us an email or catch us on Slack hubs

Awarded communities

For our awarded communities, just tell us anything you’ve done to build on the five pillars of Plastic Free Communities. Also tell us about any additional local actions in the new dashboard section. There are no set targets, just tell us what you’ve been up to this year, anything can be included.

If there is nothing to update, just tick ‘no’ when it asks if you completed anything in that section and save. Once each section is saved, with either actions filed in or a ticked box to say there were no actions, you will then have to option of uploading an annual report.

Don’t be put off! An annual report is not a requirement. Some communities choose to write them and we were asked to add this feature as they wanted to be able to send them in to us.

There is more information on your awarded community dashboard here

We hope this helps and we are looking forward to seeing everything you’ve got up to this year. No matter how much you feel you managed to do. Everything counts, and everything contributes to keeping the UK’s largest movement on single use plastic forging forwards. Together, grassroots action is having a huge impact. We want to show everyone exactly how and celebrate you.