Onboarding, step by step

Rolling out First Six is measured in weeks, not quarters. A typical onboarding runs around six to eight weeks, most of which is your side getting content and identity ready rather than us building anything. Knowing that up front helps with planning: the calendar is paced by your team's decisions and approvals, so the sooner those start, the sooner a cohort can go live.

Who needs to be at the table

Three roles, usually:

• IT / identity, to set up single sign-on against your identity provider and arrange the student roster feed.
• A wellbeing or student-success lead, to own the content: the weekly briefings, the help routes, and the crisis configuration.
• Someone in comms, to introduce First Six to students so it lands as a welcome, not a surprise.

Procurement and privacy are involved at the start (the HECVATHigher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit. A standard security questionnaire used to evaluate vendors. review, the data processing agreement) and then step back once the controls are signed off. Pulling them in early rather than late is what protects the timeline: a security or privacy objection raised in week two is a conversation, while the same objection raised the week before launch is a delay.

The sequence

1. Connect identity

   Register First Six as an application at your IdPIdentity provider. The system that authenticates your users for single sign-on, such as your institutional login. and share the connection details. This is what lets students sign in with their existing institutional credentials rather than a new password. The OIDC flow page is the technical companion for your engineers.

2. Sync the roster

   Your student information system pushes the cohort in, so students resolve to the right record when they sign in. Without this, a student could sign in but not be matched to their enrolment; with it, the first login lands them in the right place.

3. Seed the content

   Your wellbeing lead builds out the six-week arc, often by cloning a starter structure and adapting it. This is the part that carries the institution's voice, and it is usually the longest pole. See the callout below.

4. Test end to end

   We exercise sign-in and the roster against a test identity provider before your real one is in play, so launch day holds no surprises. Testing against a stand-in first means a misconfiguration is caught in rehearsal, not in front of students.

5. Introduce it to students

   Comms goes out, and the cohort starts its first week. How it is introduced matters: framed as a welcome, it lands well; arriving unannounced, it reads as a surprise.

The pre-launch checklist

Before a cohort goes live, confirm:

• Single sign-on works with a real account from your IdP.
• The roster sync runs and reconciles cleanly.
• The first weeks of content are published and targeted correctly.
• Crisis routing is configured (who gets alerted, and through which channels).
• Your privacy office has signed off and students have been told.

Common questions

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