Help categories

When a student opens the help flow they pick one button first: what is heaviest right now. Those buttons are your help categories, and each one has a help route behind it holding the words, links and any booking tool students see once they tap it.

Five categories come with First Six:

Students see	Your team sees
I feel overwhelmed	Feels overwhelmed
I want to talk to someone	Wants to talk to someone
I have money troubles	Money troubles
I'm not making friends	Not making friends
I need adjustments to study	Access and adjustments

They are a starting point, not a fixed set. Manage them under Student resources → Help, where each row is one button with its content on it.

The order here is the order students see

The list on that screen is the order the buttons appear in on the student help screen, top to bottom. Drag a row by its grip to move it, the same way you reorder blocks in a weekly briefing. A category you add lands at the bottom, which is almost always right: a new door should not push itself in front of "I want to talk to someone".

Two sets of words, on purpose

Every category carries two labels, because two audiences read it and they need different wording:

• Student wording is what a student sees on their own past request. Write it in their voice, the way the button reads.
• Staff wording is what your team sees in the help inbox, on a student's profile, and in any ticket mirrored to your help desk. Usually shorter, and about the student rather than in their voice.

Changing either changes it everywhere, including on requests students have already sent. What the student actually chose does not change: only the words you put on it.

Adding your own

Give it student wording and staff wording and save. A few that universities ask for: visa and enrolment, housing, student parents and carers, placement and practicum.

A new category shows up as a button as soon as it has a published help route behind it. Its row carries an Add content button that opens the route editor already pointed at that category: write what a student should see, and publish. Until then the row is marked No content yet and says so in as many words, because a category with nothing behind it renders no button at all and that is deliberate: an empty door is worse than no door.

If you mirror requests to a help desk, your new category appears under Settings → Integrations → Helpdesk mirror so you can route it to the team that owns it.

Retiring one

Retire takes the door off the student help screen and archives the content behind it. Use it for a category you do not have anyone to staff, or one you have replaced.

• Past requests keep the category and its wording, so your inbox and your reporting stay readable.
• The remaining buttons close up the gap; nothing else moves.
• The routes behind it are archived, not deleted, and the screen tells you how many.
• You can restore it later. Restoring brings the category and its help-desk routing back; you republish the route yourself, because putting a door back in front of students should be a deliberate act.

Delete appears only on a category you added, that has no route, and that no student has ever chosen: in other words, a typo you want gone. Anything with history retires instead, because a deleted category would leave a student's past request with nothing to call itself. The five that come with the platform cannot be deleted at all.

Who can change them

Anyone with author content permission, the same permission that governs the rest of Student resources. Every change is recorded in the activity log with who made it and what it was before.

What this does not change

Crisis requests do not use categories. A request flagged as a crisis signal routes to your crisis responders and your crisis queue whatever button the student pressed, and that is enforced in the database rather than in the app. See What fires when.