Your first week on First Six

A short on-ramp for someone who was just added to the team. Don't try to learn the whole console. The fastest path is to confirm your scope reads right, pick one concrete first task, ship it, and confirm it reaches the students you intended.

Four steps, all manual ticks. The platform can't detect whether you've learned the draft-and-publish flow; only you can. Tick each one when you've actually done the thing, not when you've read about it.

Personal scope: your ticks are yours and don't carry across to the rest of the team. New hires after you start fresh.

About 20 min · Setup checklist.

Settle in

Make sure the console looks right for you.

Confirm your scope

When you were added to First Six, your institution admin set your role (one of the built-in roles: content editor, responder, or institution admin, or a custom role your institution created) and your scope (institution-wide, cohort-bound, degree-bound, or campus-bound).

Open Your account (click your name at the bottom of the sidebar) and check your role reads the way you expected. If you thought you'd be working across a program but the role or scope isn't what you were told, talk to your admin before you start drafting. What you can do depends on this.

Tick this step once it looks right (or you've raised it with your admin).

Walk through it

• Open Your account from your name at the bottom of the sidebar. (Every staff member can reach this; you don't need admin access.)
• Confirm the role label matches what you were told.
• If you're unsure what cohorts, degrees or campuses you're scoped to, ask your institution admin. Scope is managed on the Team page.
• If anything is off, ping your institution admin before you start drafting.

In the console: Open Settings.

Find your work

Pick something up and ship it.

Find your first task

The fastest on-ramp is to pick one concrete thing and complete it. Three good first-task options:

1. Draft a new event for an upcoming week (Events → New event). Small, scoped, immediately useful.

2. Add a resource students will hit often (Student resources → Resources). Five minutes, real value.

3. Reply to a Help inbox ticket if you're a responder (Inbox). Skim the open queue, pick one that's well-scoped to your skills, acknowledge and reply.

Pick one. Don't pick three.

Walk through it

• Skim the surface that matches your role (Events for editors, Inbox for responders).
• Pick one concrete item.
• Park anything else for later.

In the console: Back to Home.

Learn the draft-and-publish flow

Almost everything in First Six flows through the same three states: draft → published (live to students) → archived (out of the listing, recoverable). Drafts are private to staff; published rows are visible to the student audience you targeted; archived rows hide from listings but keep the data.

The publish action carries an audit trail. Your name, the timestamp, and the change land in /audit. If you ship the wrong thing, unpublish it (which moves it back to draft), edit, and re-publish. Don't delete unless you mean to, and even then archive first.

Walk through it

• On any thing you've drafted, click Publish.
• Open /audit and find your action in the feed.
• Practice the rollback: unpublish, edit, re-publish.

In the console: Open Audit.

Check who it reaches

Confirm the targeting before you call it done.

Double-check your audience targeting

Every item you draft carries an audience label, shown in the composer and in the content lists. Before you call something done, read that label back and confirm it points at the students you meant to reach, and no one else.

Look at the thing you just published from that lens. Does it actually reach the audience you targeted? Does the copy read clearly to a first-time student? Are the deep links you added still valid?

Make the targeting check a habit. It's the load-bearing safety net: because audience facets combine with AND, an over-tagged item is easy to create and quietly invisible to the students who need it. Staff who skip the check ship to-do items with broken links, or to nobody at all.

Walk through it

• Open the thing you just published and find its audience label.
• Confirm it's targeted at the students who should see it.
• Re-read the copy as a first-time student would.
• Click into any links you added.

In the console: Back to Home.

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