Policies and Agreements - Setup

This article provides instruction on how to setup or update your policies in your system so that they appear in the SimplyPortal App / Customer Portal Website for your customers to acknowledge and agree to. Policies can be created per Family (e.g. for overarching policies like your Terms and Conditions) or per Student (e.g. for Photography consent).

The Policies Module is available to you if you are on the Elite subscription package. An overview of the Policies Module can be found here: Family Policies and Agreements - Overview

To setup your policies and agreements, you need to:

1. Go to your Configuration tab.

2. Click on "Policies".

Any policies you have entered into your system will be listed here. You can view at a glance the Policy Title, Association (Family / Student), Type (Mandatory, Optional, Informational), Current Version number and history, and whether a policy is Active or Inactive. 

The Policies table will be blank if you have not yet set up any policies.

The 'Photography & Media Consent on Attendance Screen' section allows you to link a Student-level policy to display a photography consent icon on the Attendance screen. Refer to  Photography & Media Consent Policies & Displaying Icon for further information on this setting.

Clicking on "History" next to each policy will display each version of the policy and whether or not it has been Forced (meaning the family has to agree to each new version). For example:

3. To add a policy, click on the green 'Add Policy Document' button.

4. To create your policy:

a. Put in a title. For example: Terms & Conditions, Photo Consent, Enrolment Agreement, etc.

b. Select your Policy Type (Mandatory, Optional/Consent or Informational). Note the Type cannot be changed once the policy is created.

- Mandatory: meant for things that are non-negotiable (like your terms and conditions, enrolment agreements, make-up policies etc)

- Optional/consent: are things your customers can opt-in or opt-out of (like photo consent/publicity consent)

- Informational: these are not policies but more things you want your customers to be aware of. You could use this for FAQs, for example.

c. Select if you would like it to be a Family Policy or a Student Policy. Keep in mind when selecting Student they will have to agree to the same policy for each student in their family. The Association cannot be changed once the policy is created.

d. Active status will already be ticked so you don't need to touch this for a new policy (if you want to later make a policy inactive, you would edit the policy and untick this box).

e. Put in your sort order if you want Policies to display in a particular order.

f. Put in your Policy content. You can create this here, or copy and paste from another document. 

f. When you are finished, click on the blue "Add Policy" button at the bottom right.

Your Policy & Agreement setup is now complete.

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Viewing Policies on a Family in SimplySwim

Staff can view agreements to policies from a family's screen in the 'Policy Agreements' section (on the right hand side below the finance and direct debit sections). You will be able to see at a glance if policies have been agreed (a green tick for yes or a red cross for no - or not yet seen and agreed to if a new policy/new customer).

Clicking on "View" next to the policy will show the Policy title and version the customer has agreed to, the date, time and location (IP address):

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How Policies appear in the SimplyPortal App / Customer Portal Website

Mandatory or Optional/consent policies will appear as pop-up windows in the SimplyPortal App / Customer Portal Website the next time a family logs in. Your customers will need to agree to (Mandatory policies) or Opt-in / Opt-out (Optional policies) of these policies before being able to action anything in the portal. They will only appear once, they do not need to agree to them each time they login to their portal.

Once agreed, the customer's agreement to a Mandatory policy cannot be changed. They are, however, able to update their consent to an Optional/Consent policy (i.e. they can later change to opt-in or opt-out of a media policy).

Mandatory Policy pop-up in Customer Portal:

Customers will have to tick that they agree and click on continue before being able to action anything in the portal. For example:

Optional/Consent Policy pop-up in Customer Portal:

Customers will have to either agree or disagree to the policy and then click "continue". For example:

Your customers can view the policies and their responses again at any time through their portal by clicking on the "View Policies & Agreements" and then "View":

As shown in the image above, the only policy that a customer can "Update" is the optional photo & social media policy. You can also see an informational policy FAQs is located there for them to view but does not require any action.

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Editing a Policy

You can edit an existing policy from your Policies list at Configuration -> Policies.

NOTE: You cannot edit the:

- policy type (Mandatory / Optional / Informational) OR

- association (Family / Student).

If you need to change either of these details, you would need to make the existing policy Inactive and create a new policy with the new Type / Association.

1. Click on "Edit" next to the policy you wish to edit. 

2. You can then edit the text in the WYSIWIG editor. 

OR

If you wish to make the policy Inactive, untick the 'Active' box.

IMPORTANT 

If you want everyone in your customer base to agree to the new version of the policy, tick the 'Force existing agreements to re-agree?' box at the bottom of the screen. 

If you leave this unticked, existing customers will remain on the version they consented to but they will not see or be forced to agree to the new version. This means only new customers joining on or after the date you implement the new policy will agree to that version of the policy.

When you are finished editing, click the blue "Update Policy" button. This will then update the policy on the Polices screen with the new version. If you ticked the force update box, the policy will appear the next time customers login to their portal.

Last updated: 8 February 2024