Get your cohort ready

This is the path from a fresh tenant to a live first cohort. Nothing in the platform self-assembles — every weekly briefing, every event, every check-in question started as a deliberate decision someone made here. The work is real, but the order matters more than the volume, which is what this guide does for you.

Twelve steps across three groups: setting up the cohort itself, building the content students will see, and launching. The first group is the foundation everything else sits on — get the term dates wrong and every week's date range needs rewriting later. The second group is the bulk of the actual work. The third group is the launch, and is mostly verification.

The card on Home and the sidebar on this page track your progress automatically. Steps tick as the platform detects them; the four manual steps are verification calls only you can make. Leave whenever you want — the state persists per cohort, so you can finish next week without losing your place.

About 90 min · Setup checklist.

Set up your cohort

Dates, brand, students, audiences.

Set your term dates and key dates

Your cohort's term dates are the spine of every other piece of timing in First Six. Week 1's date_start is computed from the semester start, the cohort pulse compares against the live week, the census date drives the support-for-students reporting window, and every event you import or sync needs to land inside a week to be visible.

Set these once, up front. Getting them wrong later means rewriting every week's date range by hand.

Walk through it

• Open Cohorts and pick the cohort you're setting up.
• Set semester_start (the Monday of Week 1).
• Set semester_end (the Sunday of your final week).
• Set census_date — usually the Wednesday of Week 3 for AU universities.
• Save. Week 1..6 ranges populate automatically.

In the console: Open Cohorts.

Confirm your brand

Your institution's logo, accent colour, and sender email were set during onboarding by your First Six contact. Staff can't edit these from the console — they're read-only here.

Open Settings and confirm the logo renders correctly, the accent colour looks right against both light and dark backgrounds, and the institution name + short name are spelled how you want them to appear in emails.

If anything's wrong, contact your First Six contact to roll the tenant config change. Tick this step once you've checked.

Walk through it

• Open Settings.
• Check institution name and short name.
• Check the brand colour against the preview tile.
• Verify the Ask Anything disclaimer reads the way you want it to.

In the console: Open Settings.

Bring in your students

Needs: set your term dates first.

Students need to exist in First Six before they can sign in. The Cohorts page has a bulk import drawer that accepts either pasted emails (one per line) or a CSV with first_name, last_name, email, student_id_ext, program_code, campus_name, and an optional first_in_family flag.

Existing student rows in the institution are matched on email + student_id_ext and updated in place — you don't need to dedupe upstream. New rows get a pre-provisioned identity that goes live the first time they sign in via SSO.

Walk through it

• Open Cohorts → the cohort → Import students.
• Paste emails OR drop a CSV.
• Confirm the row count and click Import.
• Watch the import log for any per-row errors.

In the console: Import students.

Check your audiences and groups

Audience tags are how you target a what-matters block, todo, or event at a subset of students — by program, by campus, by year level, by first-in-family status, by anything you defined. The list of tags is built from your student data on import; this step is verifying that the right tags exist and that the ones you actually plan to target are enabled.

If a program or campus is missing from the list, students probably weren't imported with that field. Go back to the import step and re-run.

Walk through it

• Open Audiences.
• Confirm each program code from your student CSV appears as a tag.
• Confirm each campus appears.
• Switch on the student-group tags you plan to target (e.g. first-in-family, international).

In the console: Open Audiences.

Build your content

Six weeks, check-in, events, library, maps.

Build your six weeks

Needs: set your term dates first.

The six-week arc is the heart of the student experience. Each week has a heading ("Week 3: settling in"), a what-matters block (the thing students should remember from this week), and a top to-do (the one thing they should actually do).

Start from a template if you have one — they're at /briefings/templates and you can clone the whole six-week shape in one click. Then edit each week's copy in place. The Cohorts page tracks completion: this step ticks when every week from 1 to weeks_count has at least one published week_block.

Walk through it

• Open Briefings.
• If a template exists for your institution, click Start from template.
• Edit each week's hero heading + supporting copy.
• Draft the what-matters block and the top to-do per week.
• Publish each week's blocks. (Step 12 below double-checks Week 1 specifically.)

In the console: Open Briefings.

Set the weekly check-in question

Needs: build your six weeks first.

Each week, students answer one wellbeing check-in question. Their responses aggregate into the cohort pulse — the calm signal that tells you what's going on for the group without surveilling any individual.

Set the question once per week (or once across the term with the same prompt). The pulse only fills in when a meaningful number of students have answered; First Six suppresses small-N reads so a quiet week doesn't read as a crisis.

Walk through it

• Open Briefings → Check-in.
• Pick a question shape (mood scale, free text, or both).
• Write the prompt for each week — or set a default that carries.
• Save.

In the console: Open check-in.

Add events for each week

Needs: build your six weeks first.

Events are the dated things students can show up to: orientation, drop-in support, social meetups, workshops. Three ways in:

1. Manually create them on /events (best for a handful per week). 2. Bulk import a CSV (best for an existing schedule). 3. Wire up the iCal sync in Settings → Events feed to auto-pull from your existing campus calendar (best when the calendar already exists upstream).

Each event carries audience targeting like the what-matters blocks. Use that to surface a tutoring drop-in only to first-in-family students, or a program-specific welcome only to that program's cohort.

Walk through it

• Open Events.
• Pick the week column you're filling.
• Use Import CSV, New event, or wait for the next iCal sync run.
• Set the audience targeting before publishing.

In the console: Open Events.

Curate your library

The library is the always-available reference layer that sits underneath the six-week arc. It carries four things: quick links (external URLs students hit often, like the LMS or the timetable), resources (PDFs and longer references), Ask Anything answers (a curated FAQ that backs the search bar), and help routes (the categorised pathways students take when they need a hand — including the crisis protocol).

Sweep through each section once. Quick links and resources can usually be done in twenty minutes. Ask Anything is worth two hours of effort because every answer here is one fewer help ticket. Help routes are the safety net; the crisis route in particular MUST be configured before any student touches the platform.

Walk through it

• Open Library.
• Add the 5-10 quick links students will hit weekly.
• Upload key PDFs as resources.
• Seed Ask Anything with the top questions you already field.
• Configure each help route — especially the talk-to-someone / crisis pathway.

In the console: Open Library.

Add your campus maps

Campus maps are PDFs students can pull up on their phone walking between buildings. Each map is tagged with a campus + a map type (general, accessibility, parking, food) so the filter chips on the student-side maps page work.

PDFs render at full resolution with pinch-zoom. Anything labelled "accessibility" is surfaced more prominently on the student side.

Walk through it

• Open Library → Campus maps.
• Upload at least one general map per campus.
• Add accessibility / parking / food maps where useful.
• Set a friendly title (not the raw filename).

In the console: Add maps.

Launch

Team, preview, go live.

Set up your team

More than one staff member needs access before you can go live. Responders see the inbox and triage help requests; editors can draft and publish content; institution admins can do both plus tenant settings.

Each staff member also carries a scope — institution-wide, by program, by campus, or by course. A responder scoped to ACC101 only sees that course's help tickets. Scopes are how you keep a Director's view separate from a teaching assistant's.

Walk through it

• Open Team.
• Invite each staff member by email.
• Set each role: responder / content_editor / institution_admin.
• Add scopes for any non-admin role.

In the console: Open Team.

Preview as a student

Needs: build your six weeks first.

Before you flip Week 1 to published, walk it as a student would. The Preview surface lets you pick any persona from your student list — a first-in-family commerce student at the regional campus, an international student in arts at the main campus — and see exactly what they'd see on sign-in.

What you're looking for: does the what-matters block read clearly to a first-time student? Does the top to-do actually have a clear action? Do the events the persona qualifies for actually show up? Does the help route they'd reach for if anxious actually exist?

Tick this step when you've walked at least two different personas through week 1.

Walk through it

• Open Preview.
• Pick a persona that resembles your hardest-to-serve cohort.
• Read week 1 top to bottom.
• Click into any quick link or help route that catches your eye.
• Switch to a second persona and re-read.

In the console: Open Preview.

Publish week one and go live

Needs: build your six weeks first.

This is the trigger. Once Week 1's content is published, any student who signs in to First Six will see it. The cohort is live.

Open Briefings → Week 1 and confirm the what-matters block, the top to-do, and any events you want visible are all status='published'. The completion check here is just: does at least one week_block for week 1 have status='published'? — but you'll want everything for week 1 published, not just one block.

Walk through it

• Open Briefings → Week 1.
• Publish the what-matters block.
• Publish the top to-do.
• Publish any week 1 events.
• Watch the home card retire from 11/12 → 12/12 → gone.

In the console: Open week 1.

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