Platform owner — your handover | First Six Knowledge

You are the dedicated staff member who will run First Six day to day — usually a student-success, engagement, or wellbeing lead, sometimes a team lead with one or two responders alongside you. This document covers the path from your very first sign-in through to the point where the in-product launch checklist takes over.

Your progress0 of 0 tasks

What's already done for you

By the time you reach this page, First Six has:

Provisioned your institution's tenant in our Sydney database.
Created your staff row with the institution_admin role.
Wired your IdP for sign-in (your IT team owns the configuration — see IT and SSO).
Set your institution's brand: logo, accent colour, short name, sender email. (These are read-only in the console; raise a change with us if anything's wrong.)
Stood up the crisis-response plumbing. You point it at your institution's actual on-call response in step 8 of the launch checklist; we built the pathway it runs along.

Everything past that point is yours to drive. Tick items off as you complete them — progress saves in your browser.

You'll sign in via your institution's SSO at https://console.firstsix.com.au. After the IdP bounce you land on the Home page. What you'll see, honestly, is empty — and that is the correct empty.

Take the six-step Staff Tour that auto-launches on first visit. It points out Home, the cohort switcher, Weekly Briefings, Students, the Writing Assistant, and the Library. Closes when you finish or dismiss it; doesn't reappear.

Confirm the footer of the left sidebar shows your name and the role "Institution admin". If it shows a different role, ask us — your permissions will be wrong until that's corrected.

The launch checklist hasn't appeared yet

The in-product 12-step launch checklist surfaces on the Home page — but only once a cohort exists. On a fresh tenant there are no cohorts yet, so the checklist banner is hidden. That's the gap this handover doc bridges: create the cohort first, then the in-product guidance kicks in.

Create your first cohort

This is the bridge step. The moment a cohort exists, the 12-step launch guide appears on Home and walks you through everything else.

Open Settings (cog icon at the bottom of the sidebar). Confirm your institution name, short name, and brand colour render the way you'd want students to see them. If anything's wrong, raise it with us before going further — these are tenant-level and need our help to change.

Open Cohorts in the sidebar and create your first cohort. Give it a meaningful name (e.g. "Semester 2 2026 — main intake"). You can leave the dates blank for now; the launch guide will walk you through setting semester_start, semester_end, and census_date in step 1.

Return to Home. Confirm the Get your cohort ready card now appears at the top, showing "0 of 12" done. That card is the in-app launch guide and is the source of truth for what comes next.

Run the in-product launch guide

The 12-step guide is grouped into three:

Set up your cohort (steps 1–4)
Term dates, brand verification, importing students, and confirming the audience tags that come out of the import. Get the dates right on the first pass — every weekly date range computes from semester_start, so changing them later means rewriting six weeks of content by hand.
Build your content (steps 5–9)
The six-week arc, the weekly check-in question, events, the library (quick links, resources, Ask Anything, help routes), and campus maps. This is the bulk of the work. The crisis help route (step 8, inside Library) is a hard prerequisite for going live — see the safety-net guide for the detailed walkthrough.
Launch (steps 10–12)
Add your responders + content editors to the Team, preview week one as a student, then publish week one. The moment Week 1 is published, any student who signs in sees it. That's go-live.

Click into the launch card on Home and skim all 12 step titles so you know the shape of the work ahead.

Step 1: term dates set.Step 3: students imported. (Step 2 is a brand verification — quick.)Step 4: audience tags confirmed.Steps 5–7: six weeks of content + the check-in question + events.Step 8: library curated, including the crisis help route.Step 9: campus maps uploaded.Step 10: at least one responder added.Step 11: walked week one as at least two student personas.Step 12: week one published. Cohort is live.

Don't skip the preview step

Step 11 — walking week one as a student — is the only place you'll catch tone-of-voice misses, broken audience targeting, or a help route that points nowhere. The platform can't tell you whether your what-matters block reads kindly to a first-in-family student; only you can.

After go-live: the ongoing rhythm

Once the launch checklist retires, your weekly cadence is roughly:

Daily: glance at the Inbox. Triage any help requests that haven't been picked up by a responder. The crisis pathway already paged you (and the wider responder pool) the moment one was flagged; the Inbox is for the rest.
Weekly: review the cohort Pulse (under Insights). It's a small-N-suppressed read of the weekly check-in — calm signal, not surveillance. If a week trends low, that's the week to surface extra support.
Weekly: publish the next week's content. The 6-week arc is authored up-front but each week's blocks should still be reviewed before they go live.
Per term: roll the cohort over (use the roll-a-cohort-over guide) and re-confirm dates / events / audience tags.

Set a daily reminder to check the Inbox.Set a weekly reminder to review the cohort Pulse.Set a weekly reminder to publish the upcoming week.

When to ask for help

You can email support@firstsix.com.au for anything from "how do I…" through to "the SSO isn't working for one student". Same-business-day acknowledgement; faster on crisis-pathway incidents.

For the cyber team's pre-launch sign-off, point them at the cybersecurity and privacy handover. For SSO and integrations work, your IT team should be working from IT and SSO. For the executive sponsor's view, Leadership and sponsor.