Every activity, group, and team on Talentelly is built on one thing: people who are actually associated with your entity. There are two ways to get someone in — one at a time, or all at once — and which one you reach for depends entirely on how many people you're adding this week.
Adding one person at a time
From Users in the admin sidebar, the Add user button opens a form to associate a single person with your entity and assign them a role. This is the right tool for a trickle of new members — a trialist who just joined, a late transfer, a coach hire — where templating a spreadsheet for one row would be slower than just typing it in.
Example: Lakshmi transfers from the morning batch to the evening batch at a coding bootcamp. The admin opens Users, finds her existing profile, and updates her role/association instead of creating a second "Lakshmi K." record that would fragment her history across two profiles.
Adding many people at once
Upload Users is the bulk path — built for admissions season, a new cohort, or migrating a roster from a spreadsheet. It expects a specific template with five columns: first name, last name, date of birth, email, and gender. Keep to exactly those fields; anything else in your source file needs to be mapped or dropped before upload.
The upload checks for duplicate emails against your existing roster and flags them rather than silently creating duplicate people.
Example: Northfield Public School receives a district export of new Grade 6 students. The admin trims the sheet down to the five required columns, fixes a handful of malformed email addresses the upload flags, and re-uploads — by Monday the new students are associated and ready to be added to groups for sports trials.
One a time vs. bulk — which to use
| Situation | Approach |
|---|---|
| A handful of new trialists after a weekend camp | Add user, one at a time — faster than building a spreadsheet for five rows |
| A few hundred students from a registrar's export | Upload Users with the five-column template |
| Fixing a typo on an existing record | Users search + edit directly — don't re-upload the whole file over one correction |
For individuals: your side of the house
Once associated, an individual manages their own presence separately from what the entity controls:
- Profile — photo, bio, and the public-facing details that show up on hub pages and shared certificates.
- Activity — a chronological record of what they've joined, played in, or completed.
- Entities — which organizations they're associated with, useful when someone moves schools or clubs.
- Settings and notifications — their own login, password, and notification preferences.
Example: Arjun is applying for a summer theater program. He updates his profile photo and confirms his public highlights are current, well before an entity generates any certificate that will show his name.
Why accurate names matter more than they seem
Hub pages and shared certificate links pull directly from the same profile fields. If an entity issues a certificate before someone's finished setting up their profile, the certificate and the public hub page can disagree on something as basic as a name. The fix is either a naming-convention rule at import time (e.g. always Last, First), or a nudge to associated members to confirm their name and photo before a certificate run — not a correction after the fact.
Related: Entity management · Groups and teams · Getting started