There are three basic steps in working with a partner or partners to help meet your school resource needs.


The first step is awareness. You need to make the partner or partners aware of your needs. EZPartner helps by setting up a request that clearly defines your need. You can create an active request that appears on the EZPartner website and can be linked to from your school website. You can also notify registered partners that are linked to your school on their profile when you create your request. Your Partners In Ed office can send periodic email blasts of school requests to the partner community to encourage them to take the next step and contact you.


The second step is matching the partner(s) to your request. This is likely to involve some offline communications with the partner contact, either by phone, email or in-person.


Once you know a partner is going to assist on a request EZPartner lets you match the partner(s) that commit to working with you as the first step in recording outcomes. To match a partner to your request follow these steps -

  1. Sign-in to your EZPartner account

  2. Navigate to Staff > Requests

  3. Click on the name of a request you want to match to a partner

  4. Choose the Outcomes button

  5. From the list of all your district’s partners choose the one(s) that will be working with you


Matching partners to your request will also cause your request to display in the partner’s account when they sign-in. This means they can see who the contact is at your school, and can see the outcomes you have recorded and record outcomes on their own behalf.


The final step is recording outcomes. This can be in the form of help with individual students, staff assistance or recognition, volunteer time or donations. To do any of these you will need to navigate to the Outcomes page for your request and then based on the resources your partner(s) contributed use the DETAILS button.


Outcome categories include -

Students - This is the number of students that directly benefited from the partner’s contribution. This could be a single student intern; a classroom field trip to a visit; or a guest speaker for an entire grade or school.

Staff - This outcome details the number of staff that directly benefited and the number of hours involved. This allows you to track any professional development time spent by your staff in working with a partner. You can also use this to track staff appreciation events contributed by partners.

Volunteers - You can track partners’ employees who volunteer at your school. This is measured as number of volunteers and total hours of volunteer time. For example, if five employees came to your school for three hours to help judge a competition you would record the outcome as 5 volunteers and 15 hours.

Donations - Any financial or in-kind donations made by a partner can be recorded in terms of their whole dollar value.

A Tip About Creating and Managing Requests

You should think of a request in one of two ways. It is either an ‘Ask’ for assistance to an individual partner or the district’s partner community, or it is a record of what you received from partners (whether you had to Ask or not.)


That means you should consider creating enough offers to record periodic ‘walk-in’ or unsolicited contributions at the beginning of the school year and then create new requests when you need to Ask for assistance.


For example, you could make a request named ‘Unsolicited Donations’ at the start of the school year; set the expiration date to the end of the school year; set the request as PRIVATE (so it won’t appear in the active requests list), and then simply match partners to the request and record outcomes anytime the make a donation of money or in-kind materials.