ForwardTrack Impact Metrics

Overview

ForwardTrack can now track participants' impact, over multiple degrees of separation, in terms of any numeric quantity. By default, campaigns and impact are measured only in terms of how many participants have registered with that campaign. But, as detailed below, you can use it to track other metrics such as fincancial contributions (micro-bundling!), trees saved, or children hugged.

Installation

The metrics you will track must be decided upon and configured before completing the ForwardTrack installation process, specifically, before creating the database schema.

Initializing the system to track more metrics:

  1. Create a custom .ini file to define your impact metrics.

    For examples as to how to do this, see ft/metrics.ini

  2. Edit the FT_CUSTOM_INI_FILE setting in ft/config.inc.php to indicate the location of this custom .ini file, as described in install.html.

If you want to add metrics after installation, you must create/edit/configure the custom .ini as described above, and also manually add the appropriate columns to your ft_node and ft_stat MySQL tables.

Use in Code/Templates

modify your code to some how use these. modify the templates to display/input them.

If you want to increment/aggregate metrics using custom/out-of-band interaction (i.e. taking donations on a separate page on your site, check out the increment_metric method on the FT_Core_Node class (in ft/lib/FT/Core/Node.class.php)

If you want people to input their metrics when registering, check out the commented-out code in style/templates/campaign/form-[register,accept].html. If formatted correctly, the inputs will be handled automatically by the increment_metrics_from_form method of the FT_App_CampaignApp class (in ft/lib/FT/App/CampaignApp.class.php), which you can always subclass if you want...