Before you start
Collect these first. Chasing them mid-setup is what turns four weeks into eight.
From whoever runs the school office
From your board
Week 1Foundation
Everything here is done by one person: you, the owner. Roughly an afternoon.
Create the school
Sign up and choose Start your school. You'll be asked four things: your organisation's name, a web address, what kind of organisation you are, and your time zone.
The web address becomes where everyone signs in — yourschool.togetherparentclub.org. Keep it short and obvious; your families will type it. A few words like admin and help are reserved.
The time zone matters more than it looks: every reminder, deadline and attendance record uses it. The form shows you the current time at your school, so check it against your phone before you continue.
Submitting sets up a lot at once: your school goes live, a public website appears with sensible defaults, every feature is switched on, grades PreK through 12 are created, and a 30-day trial starts. You get a welcome email with a short checklist. Two things are deliberately left empty for you: the parent FAQ, and athletics venues.
Your trial gives you everything for 30 days. If you haven't chosen a paid plan by day 30, the school drops to the Free plan and every feature Free doesn't include switches itself off.
That matters because the features you're most likely to build in weeks 2 and 3 — sign-up sheets, discussions, the community board, polls, surveys, and everything to do with the school day — are not on Free. A school that spends three weeks setting up dismissal pickup and homework, then lands on Free, loses all of it overnight. Nothing is deleted, but parents stop seeing it.
Go to Admin → Plan & billing and pick one. Paying annually costs ten months instead of twelve.
Add your logo and colours
Go to Admin → Settings. Fill in your organisation name, the school you serve, your state, your time zone and your support email. Upload the logo, then set your two colours.
Your state sets the governing law in the terms and privacy pages that are generated for you. Get it right.
As you type each colour, four small readouts tell you whether text will still be readable on it. They warn but don't stop you. If one shows a warning, pick a darker shade — a pale brand colour makes your buttons unreadable for some parents.
Choose what's switched on
Go to Admin → Feature flags. Everything arrives switched on, so this week is mostly about turning things off until you're ready to run them.
The page works in drafts. Flip switches and nothing changes for anyone until you click Review and publish. An amber bar reminds you when you have unpublished changes, and shows you every change as before-and-after before it goes live.
Leave on
News, Calendar, Directory, Volunteers, Sign-ups, Parent FAQ, Gallery, Recognition, Messages and Class contact lists. These are what your launch email will point families at.
Switch off for now
| Turn off | Turn it back on when |
|---|---|
| Discussions, Community board | Someone has agreed to moderate them. Both are written by parents, so you can't prepare them in advance. |
| Polls, Surveys | You've written the first one. |
| Homework, Classroom, Absence reporting, Dismissal pickup | Week 2 is done and teachers are assigned to classes. These are the features teachers act on — switching them on with no teachers attached just confuses parents. |
| Enrichment & Teams, Athletics | Your activities, teams and coaches exist. That's week 2 too. |
| Fundraising | Your bank account is connected in week 3. Nothing can be donated until it is. |
| Open sign-up | Launch day. Until then families join by invitation only, which keeps your roster clean. |
Each feature can be aimed at particular people instead of everyone. Switch Homework on for Teachers only while two classes trial it, then widen it to Everyone once it works.
Decide who can do what
Go to Admin → Roles & permissions. This is the part most boards don't know exists, and it solves a problem every board has: your communications chair needs to send emails, but you don't want to hand them the keys to everything.
Alongside the built-in roles — teacher, coach, room parent, athletic director — you can create your own. A role is a name, a short description, and a list of what that person may do. You can base it on a built-in role, in which case they get everything that role gets plus whatever you add.
| Role | Useful for |
|---|---|
| Communications chair | Sending email campaigns and live alerts, publishing news — without seeing family records. |
| Registrar | Managing the class roster, and nothing else. |
| Volunteer coordinator | Creating volunteer opportunities and sign-up sheets. |
| Athletics scheduler | Booking facilities, based on the athletic director role. |
Someone holding one of these sees a small section in their own sidebar with just the pages they can use. They never see the admin console. You can hold up to 20 roles, and the Check a person tab shows you exactly what any one member can do and why — worth using before you tell someone their access is ready.
Roles are assigned on Admin → Members. Like features, permission changes are drafts until you publish them.
What "teacher" or "admin" means is set by the platform and is the same at every school. You shape your own roles, not the built-in ones. That's deliberate — it keeps support answers consistent.
Invite the board
Go to Admin → Member invitations → Add a member. Enter the person, tick Admin, and send.
This is the only way to make someone an admin. It cannot be done by spreadsheet, no matter how the columns are labelled — and neither can your custom roles. Give admin to the people who will actually do next week's uploads; everyone else can hold a role you built, or just be an ordinary member on a committee.
Invitations expire after 21 days. If email is slow, the invitation board gives you a link you can send by hand.
Turn on two-factor sign-in
Ask every admin to switch it on from Profile → Two-factor sign-in before week 2 starts. You are about to load every family's contact details into this thing.
There is no self-service recovery. If someone loses their phone, another admin or support has to remove it for them by hand. Anyone who won't keep a backup code somewhere safe should not have admin access.
Week 2People and classes
The long week. Do it in this order — the uploads genuinely refuse to run otherwise.
Your board will call all of them "the people list". They are not interchangeable. Download each one from the page that asks for it, and don't reuse a file from a different page.
| Spreadsheet | One row per | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Class roster | Student | Creates children and files them into classes |
| Parent contacts | Parent | Creates families and their invitations |
| Teacher upload | Teacher | Adds staff members |
| Teacher class assignments | Teacher | Puts existing teachers in front of classes |
All of them take .csv or .xlsx, up to 5,000 rows. Column headings are matched loosely, so "Surname" and "Cell" work fine.
1. Type in your classes
Go to Admin → Classes and add each one. There is no bulk import here — if the school has 30 homerooms, you type 30 names. It takes ten minutes and it is the only truly tedious part.
Use the names that appear in your student spreadsheet's Class column. Capitals don't matter, but wording does: if the spreadsheet says "3B" and you type "Grade 3B", every row for that class is refused.
2. Upload the students
Go to Admin → Class roster → Upload and review. The only required columns are the child's first and last name and their class. Include the Student ID if you have it.
Nothing is applied straight away. The review screen sorts every row into New students, Moving class, Unchanged, Needs fixing and Duplicates. Work through anything flagged, hold back any row you're unsure about, then apply.
Putting a parent's email on a student row prepares their invitation. It does not send it. Sending is a separate, deliberate step on the next page. Tell your board, or they will assume the parents have been contacted.
3. Upload the parents, then send the invitations
Go to Admin → Member invitations → Upload contacts. Every row needs an email address or a mobile number. You can also include a second guardian's email, pickup details like a car decal number, and which roles someone holds.
Review the rows the same way, import, then send the invitations. The first 40 go immediately and the rest queue up and send in batches over the following minutes. Each family gets the message in their own language, with your school's name and colour on it.
The invitation board then counts three things: still to send, awaiting sign-up, and joined. Come back a week later and resend to anyone still awaiting sign-up. You can also fix a typo in an address, or copy a link to send another way.
4. Put teachers in front of classes
- Make sure the person holds the Teacher role — either from the Roles column of your upload, or by ticking Teacher on Admin → Members.
- Go to Admin → Teachers and assign each one to a class or a whole grade. One teacher can hold several.
- A "Setup pending" badge means they haven't signed in yet. Nudge them.
Teachers only ever see their own classes. Nothing you do here exposes one class's families to another teacher.
5. Room parents, coaches and teams
Room parents (Admin → Room parents) need a child on file. Pick the person, pick their class. They can then run sign-up sheets, polls and surveys for that class only.
Teams and after-school activities both live under Admin → Enrichment. Create the activity, set its capacity and sessions, and tick This is a sports team if it needs games, scores and snack rotas.
Coaches (Admin → Coaches) get a setup email with a link that lasts 48 hours. If your parent spreadsheet has a "Teams coached" column, create the teams before you upload it, so the names match.
6. Approve, and clean up
- Admin → Members is where you approve people who signed themselves up, and where you hand out roles. Nobody gets in until you approve them.
- The Incomplete profiles panel lists parents who joined but never finished setting up. Send them a reminder from here; the system also nudges them daily.
- Admin → Families & skills lets you merge duplicate children and families, and link or unlink a guardian. To browse children by class, use Class roster instead.
Do the merging now. Once parents start using the directory, duplicates multiply and get much harder to untangle.
If a guardian shouldn't be on a family any more, unlink them — that leaves the children where they are. Deleting a whole family is a separate action that asks you outright whether the children go too. Read that question before answering it.
Week 3Things for parents to do
Your board can split this week up. Nothing here depends on anything else.
The calendar
Admin → Events. Each event needs a date, a place, and one decision: is it a school event (shown for information only) or a parent club event (parents can RSVP and sign up to help)?
Two things people ask for that don't exist yet: repeating events, and a calendar feed you can subscribe to in Google or Apple Calendar. Enter recurring dates individually, or set them up as team sessions, which do repeat.
Sign-up sheets
Admin → Sign-up sheets. Give the sheet a title, add your slots, and choose who can see it — everyone, or one class, grade, team, committee or role.
Spot limits and closing times are properly enforced, so two parents can't take the last slot at the same moment. Closing times are read in your school's time zone, which is why week 1 asked you to check it. Waitlist offers go out every hour and reminders the day before, without you doing anything.
Once a sheet works, Duplicate it each term rather than rebuilding it.
News
Admin → News. The editor asks you six questions and writes the post. There are templates for weekly updates, event recaps, fundraiser progress and urgent notices.
A published post sits on the News page waiting to be found. If it matters, send an email campaign as well.
The parent FAQ
Admin → FAQ. This starts completely empty, and filling it is the highest-value hour of the whole four weeks.
Write down the ten questions your school office answers every single week: drop-off times, the uniform store, early pickup, reporting an absence, how to reach a teacher, lunch, after-school, the calendar, how to volunteer, who to email. Mark them Featured so they appear as tiles at the top. Answers are translated for a family the first time one of them reads it in another language.
Public pages
Admin → Pages. Good first pages: About the club, Board members, Meeting dates, Bylaws. Write the first draft yourself — the editor can polish what you've written, but nothing writes a page from nothing. Your events are never shown publicly, by design.
Donations
Only the owner can set this up. Money settles into your own bank account through Stripe — you don't need a Stripe account of your own; you just click through their form.
- Admin → Payments → Connect. You'll be asked for your organisation's details, a signatory and a bank account.
- Come back and press Refresh status after you finish. You're looking for "Connected".
- Then set up your campaign under Admin → Fundraising, with a goal and a public donation page you can share anywhere.
Every donation has to come through the donation page. There's no way to add a cheque or a cash gift to a campaign total, so the thermometer on screen won't match your treasurer's figure if you take money at the door. Decide now how your board will handle that — most keep the offline total in their own accounts and mention it in the news post.
Week 4Launch
Test everything on yourself first
Use your own account and your own phone. Twenty minutes here saves a very bad morning.
| Test | How |
|---|---|
| Send yourself a campaign, then check Admin → Email log. Failed messages can be retried from there. | |
| Phone notifications | Install the app on your phone, allow notifications, and send yourself a live alert. |
| Text messages | Send an alert to one admin who has opted in. Not available on the Free plan. |
| Contact form | Fill it in from your public site as a visitor. It should reach every admin. |
The launch email
Go to Admin → Email campaigns. Four things belong in it:
- What this is and why the school is using it.
- Where to sign in — your school's own address, not the main website.
- That an admin approves each account, so there may be a short wait.
- That they must finish their profile before anything opens up.
Campaigns default to Members, which only reaches people who have already joined — on launch day that's almost nobody. Change it to All.
The same day, switch open sign-up on so families your contact list missed can join themselves. Approvals then become a daily job for a week or two.
Have one news post and one sign-up sheet live before you send it. An empty app makes a poor first impression.
Your final check
Using your own web address
Available on Community and above, owner only, from Admin → Settings → Domains and senders. You'll be given two records to add wherever your domain is registered, and the page tracks four steps until it's live. It rechecks every ten minutes, or you can prompt it.
Moving to a new address signs everyone out once, and every parent has to re-enable phone notifications on every device. Painless in week 4 with twelve board members. Painful in November with 400 families.
After launch
What you do
| How often | What |
|---|---|
| Daily at first, then weekly | Approve new members. Chase incomplete profiles. |
| Weekly | Check absences and pickups, answer live chat, glance at the email log for failures. |
| Weekly | One news post. At most one email campaign — more than that and people stop reading. |
| Monthly | Read your analytics and your usage figures on the billing page. |
| Each term | Duplicate your sign-up sheets, close finished ones, refresh the FAQ. |
| June | Run the new school year rollover. |
Analytics tells you how many members are active, how many people RSVP and how fast, how full your sign-up sheets get, and whether your messages are being delivered. It does not track who opened what.
What happens without you
Parents receive these automatically. You don't configure them, but you should know they're going out.
- Reminders the day before an event, a volunteer shift or a sign-up slot they've taken.
- Homework reminders in the evening for work due tomorrow.
- Waitlist offers, sent hourly, that expire if ignored.
- Nudges to finish an unfinished profile.
- Coaches get warned about certificates expiring within 30 days.
Every parent controls all of it under their own notification settings, and unsubscribes are honoured.
If a card fails
A failed payment puts the school past due, and after 14 days it's suspended. Suspended means everyone can still read everything, but campaigns, texts and AI stop until the card is updated. Nothing is lost. The owner fixes it from Plan & billing.
Moving up a year, in June
Admin → New school year. Create next year's classes first — the page won't plan without them. Then work through the rollover. It shows you exactly what will happen (who moves up, who graduates, who's held back) and lets you change any child's placement before anything is applied.
You can roll the whole thing back right up until you activate the new year. After that you can't, so read the summary properly.
Children who graduate or leave are never deleted. They come off class lists and stay findable under "Show former students".
Getting your data out
Settings → Data → Export everything builds a zip of every list, with a download link good for seven days. Do it once a term and keep it somewhere the next board can find it.
The same page has Platform access, which shows every occasion support has looked at your school, why, and for how long. Sessions last an hour and always have a written reason attached.
Good to know
Not problems, but they surprise people. Better to hear them now.
- Classes are typed one at a time. No shortcut.
- Admin and your own roles are never granted by spreadsheet. The upload can grant teacher, coach, athletic director and room parent — nothing else.
- Uploading a roster doesn't email parents. Sending invitations is a separate step.
- No repeating events and no calendar you can subscribe to in Google or Apple Calendar.
- There's no join code and no way to restrict joining to one email domain. Approving each person is the control.
- You can't change what the built-in roles mean. Build your own instead.
- Online donations only. Cash and cheques can't be added to a campaign total.
- Nothing writes a page for you. The editor improves a draft; a person writes the first version.
- SVG logos are refused even though the upload hint mentions them. Use a PNG.
- Two-factor has no self-service recovery. Keep your backup codes.
- The Free plan has no text messages, no AI help and no support inbox. Hear those three together before you choose it.
- Your public site never lists events. That's deliberate.
- US dollars only.
Where to get help
The Help & support page inside your school has short how-to articles, filtered to whatever roles you hold — 41 of them for admins. It covers everything in this guide in more detail, and it's always current. Custom roles are the one thing it doesn't have an article for yet; use the week 1 section above.
Three things worth sending on to other people, rather than explaining yourself:
- Teachers → Getting set up as a teacher
- Coaches → Setting up your coach account
- Parents → Getting started: signing in and approval, and Finishing your profile
If a district asks your board about security or data protection, there's a security FAQ in the Help Center under Security & privacy. Send them that rather than answering it yourself.