The ‘Test mode’ option has been removed from the SUMAC platform. This article covers testing on the live platform.
If you have worked through the settings on the Basic tab, the Matching tab, the Signup Form tab and the Email Templates tab, you are now ready to publish your scheme for live testing and to allow people to register as scheme members.
The process to switch your scheme to ‘Live’ is very simple indeed. Just go to the ‘Basic’ tab in Scheme Settings and switch ‘Allow signup’ to ‘Yes’.
Your scheme signup form is now a live webform and you can copy the link at the top of the Basic Settings screen and propagated it out via emails webpages and so on, so that people can access the signup form and register for your programme.
However before you get the link out there where your target membership can find it is good practice to test your whole scheme workflow.
The testing process requires some member records to be populated into your scheme. You can either do this from the ‘Add member’ button on the ‘Members’ screen, or by using the signup form itself.
We would advise using the signup form as this will give you the opportunity to test the form and to put yourself into the position of a potential applicant. Hopefully you will spot any errors or ambiguities and you can make sure all the fields work as intended and that the whole form is effective, with all the necessary guidance and set out in a well-structured and logical format.
To use the form, copy the URL from the Basic Settings tab, open an incognito browser session and ‘paste and go’ to the signup form URL.
If you populate at least one mentor and mentee profile into the scheme, you can then go through your matching workflow and check that the matching process works as intended, that your preference fields are returning meaningful scores and that the system emails are all working and will make sense to scheme members.
Once you have completed your testing and made any final changes to settings and email templates, you are good to go and you can start publicising your new scheme and promoting the signup form link.
Test profiles can easily be permanently deleted from your scheme. Go to the profile and click the ‘Delete’ icon (rubbish bin). Once you confirm, the profile will be permanently deleted.
If there is only test data in the scheme (i.e. there is no real member profiles present from earlier activity – either active or withdrawn), then you can use the ‘Clear scheme’ option at the bottom of the ‘basic tab’ in Scheme settings.
