Prepare the Support for Students evidence pack

The annual Support for Students evidence pack. This guide pulls together the board report and the underlying CSVs, then spends its second half on framing — because the framing is what stops a strong report from becoming a fragile one when an auditor reads it.

The two framing rules to internalise before you write a line: morale data is a leading indicator (it tells you what students feel now, which informs what retention might look like), it is not retention proof. Engagement data is participation evidence (students opened the content), it is not learning evidence. The difference is small in words and very large in defensibility.

Run this end-to-end once per academic year, close to your submission deadline. If you export the numbers a week before you write the narrative, the totals in your text will drift from the totals in the export, and the auditor will spot it.

About 15 min · Reference guide.

Pull the board report

The narrative + the charts your board will read.

Open Insights and read what's there

Insights at /insights aggregates the cohort pulse, the engagement rollup, the morale report, and the cohort comparison. Read each tab before you start exporting — the narrative comes from here, not from staring at CSVs.

What you're looking for in Insights: how morale moved week-to-week, where engagement is concentrated (which weeks, which audiences), where Reach is below the small-N threshold (which means you've got a thin signal and should say so in the report), and any patterns across audiences (program, campus, first-in-family).

Walk through it

• Open Insights.
• Read the Pulse tab. Note the highest and lowest weeks for morale.
• Read Engagement. Note the weeks with the strongest open + complete rates.
• Read Morale. Note any small-N suppressions — these limit what you can claim.

In the console: Open Insights.

Download the board report PDF

The Morale report at /insights/morale has a Download PDF action that renders a board-ready document: cover page with cohort N, week-by-week pulse with annotations, engagement summary, the morale chart with the small-N wall annotated where it applies.

Use this PDF directly in the evidence pack. It already carries the framing rules (small-N suppression, leading-indicator language) so you don't have to re-do them in your own document.

Walk through it

• Open the Morale section on Insights.
• Click Download PDF.
• Save with a clear filename (institution + term + "morale-report").

In the console: Open Morale report.

Export the underlying numbers

What the auditors will ask for.

Export your data from Settings

Settings → Export your data produces a zip containing the underlying CSVs that back the board report: per-week pulse counts, per-audience engagement, help-request volume + resolution times, and the anonymised reflection corpus if you've enabled it. Identifiers are pseudonymised — the export is safe to share with an auditor without exposing individual students.

Run the export close to when you're finalising the evidence pack so the numbers match what's in your written narrative. If the export and the narrative were pulled days apart, the auditor will spot the drift.

Walk through it

• Open Settings → Export your data.
• Pick the term + cohort range.
• Download the zip.
• Cross-check the totals against what you wrote.

In the console: Open Settings.

Pull the engagement rollup CSV

the Engagement section on Insights has a CSV download with the three-letter rollup: Reach (% of cohort who opened the week's content), Frequency (average opens per active student), Completeness (% of published content actually consumed). Per week, per audience.

This is the data your board will want to see broken out: not just "engagement was 78%" but "engagement was 91% for the first three weeks then 64% from Week 4 onwards." The CSV gives you the shape; the board narrative interprets it.

Walk through it

• Open the Engagement section on Insights.
• Click Download CSV.
• Filter to the audiences that matter for the report.

In the console: Open Engagement.

Pull the pulse CSV

The Pulse CSV from /insights/pulse gives you the per-week mood signal: positive / neutral / concerned counts, with anything below the suppression threshold returned as null. The threshold is configurable per institution but lives in the Settings → Privacy controls.

When you read this CSV, watch for nulls. They aren't "missing data" — they're "not enough students answered to show a real signal." Quote them as that in the report, not as zero.

Walk through it

• Open the Pulse section on Insights.
• Click Download CSV.
• Note any small-N suppressed weeks — call them out as such.

In the console: Open Pulse.

Frame the narrative

Leading indicators, not retention claims.

Frame morale as a leading indicator

The temptation in a board report is to claim morale data as retention proof — "morale was high, so retention will be high." This is wrong, and an auditor will catch it. Morale is a leading indicator: it tells you what students are feeling now, which informs what retention might look like next term once enrolment data is in. Frame it as such.

Good framing: "Morale data shows X% positive responses in Week 3, suggesting most students felt supported during the census-week stress window."

Bad framing: "Morale data demonstrates we will retain X% of students."

The difference is small in words and large in defensibility.

Walk through it

• Read your morale narrative. Find every retention-adjacent claim.
• Rewrite each as a leading-indicator statement.

In the console: Open Morale report.

Frame engagement as participation, not learning

Engagement metrics measure participation in the First Six surfaces (opens, completions, reactions). They don't measure learning outcomes. Frame them as participation evidence: "X% of students engaged with the support content," not "X% of students benefited from the support content."

Benefit / outcome claims need outcome data — academic results, follow-up surveys, retention rates — which First Six doesn't claim to measure. Keep the lanes separate.

Walk through it

• Read your engagement narrative. Find every "benefit" or "outcome" claim.
• Rewrite each as a participation statement.

In the console: Open Engagement.

What to leave out of the evidence pack

The evidence pack is cohort-level. Do not include per-student check-in scores, individual reflection text, individual help-request content, or any aggregate where the cohort segment is below the small-N suppression threshold. The platform won't let you export those at the per-student level by default; if you're hand-stitching numbers from somewhere else, hold that line yourself.

Aggregate-only is also the privacy posture students were promised when they signed in. Breaking it for a board report is the fastest way to lose trust in the entire signal.

Walk through it

• Scan the evidence pack for any per-student names, ids, or quotes.
• Remove them.
• Confirm every aggregate is above the small-N suppression threshold for its cohort segment.

In the console: Open Insights.

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