The organisations Yapster serves are multi-site operators who use the Yapster newsfeed to distribute company news and recognition pieces at scale. Yapster’s newsfeed announcements feature allows senior leadership teams to communicate critical updates, with teams needing to interact with these posts to acknowledge the announcement (orange flashing icon).

Announcements pushed to the newsfeed are by definition relevant to all staff, whereas standard newsfeed posts aren’t guaranteed to be relevant to all teams at the same time.

Multi-timeline setup makes sure everything that you can see on your News tab stays relevant to you.

Download this template in order to complete your hierarchy importer - we'll require this in order to understand your company hierarchy, and how your sites relate to areas and regions within the organisation.

We've put together the following explainer to help you complete the above template. Feel free to send us your completed spreadsheet for review.

Each row of the CSV file specifies one ‘branch’ of the hierarchy you are creating.

A row must specify:

An example of a minimal import file follows:

This would establish the following hierarchy:

Note that we have added a numeric suffix to the ‘group id’ columns: ‘group id 1’ and ‘group id 2’.

These must be provided and dictate the relationship between the groups. In this example the groups in ‘group id 1’ are the parents of those in ‘group id 2’.

The hierarchy is constructed in ascending order, from lowest to highest:

(The group specified under ‘group id 1’ becomes the parent of the group under ‘group id 2’, etc.)

You can specify as many groups on a row as you wish but they must have unique suffixes and those suffixes should be the same for the ‘group id’, ‘group name’, and ‘group role’ of each individual group.

(The order of the columns in the file doesn’t matter—only the numeric sequence.)

Our user/group import is a CSV file that only specifies each employees primary location (e.g. the pub they work in.) We also have country and region managers that are assigned to those groups.

After a user/group import our Yapster directory just has the following groups in a flat list:

There is no hierarchy and no way to address all employees in a given region or area.

We can use a hierarchy import to fix that and create the relationships between our countries, regions, and pubs:

In the above example we’ve:

After importing this file our group hierarchy in Yapster would match that of the diagram above.

(We’ve used the roles of ‘region’, ‘area’, and ‘store’ to benefit from Yapsters existing data analysis based on those groupings.)

We could also specify the exact same hierarchy by having one row in the import file per pub:

This would result in exactly the same relationships and hierarchy being created in Yapster. There is no benefit to either style—you can use whichever is most convenient for you and your data (and even have a mix of both!).

The above example has regional groupings for England but none for Wales as they were not present in our primary user/group import.

We can rectify this by creating Welsh regional groups in our hierarchy import:

Or, again, with all the groups of a ‘branch’ on a single row:

ℹ️ Note that we only need to specify the name of the new group, we don’t need to specify the names of the other groups as they already exist in Yapster.

Following this import our hierarchy in Yapster would look like: