What's New in Torque - January, '22

Happy new year and welcome to the second edition of What's New in Torque.

Incorporating Stage 2 documentation into Torque

We want you to be confident that Torque will always have the most up-to-date information whether you're managing a competition or curating proposals for a donor. This means that ALL Stage 2 data is accessible to you in Torque. Working with Kristen and Adi, we've developed a mock-up of what we think a typical proposal should look like with the tabs for the following (Bold = Stage 2):

Revised Proposal

Factsheet

Appendices

Diligence

Original Proposal

Evaluations

Analysis

Based on feedback from Kristen's team, we're working on the second iteration of the mock-up which we'll share with you all early next week if not sooner.

Torque's API now exporting data to Airtable

Last month we told you we're moving data from the BSN Airtable base to Torque to facilitate search filtering. Now, we're returning the favor. Torque recently pushed all the data for the Stronger Democracy finalists into Airtable eliminating the need for manual entry. To quote Adi:

"This is a great start and has already saved future Adi so much time! . . . Everything I need for my workflow is perfectly in place."

The standard process for submitting data for upload (ETL) into Torque

OK, this isn't completely new . . . instead, it's more of a refinement. The ETL* process (for getting data into Torque) was standardized last year. However, as we learned from the Stronger Democracy Award competition, the twice-weekly timeline won't always align with competition management or donor needs. Understanding this, here's how we'll manage future data uploads:

Data to be uploaded into to Torque should be added to the Dropbox folder by the end of the day Monday or Thursday. Data added by Monday will be uploaded on Tuesday; data added by Thursday will be uploaded on Friday.

If this schedule doesn't meet the needs of the competition, please email Jeff and Jim with any special requests identifying:

The type of data to be uploaded

When the data will be available in the Dropbox folder

When the data should be accessible in Torque

Any special instructions

Based on workload, OTS will expedite special requests. While it may not be possible to meet every deadline, our experience with the Stronger Democracy demonstrated that early notice and good communication ensured that every request could be fulfilled.

*ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load which is basically the fancy way of saying "putting data in Torque."