Step 1 – Setup
Before we can start creating our booking system, we need to ensure our teachers and classes are setup correctly. Log into your dashboard and click into the settings tab on the left-hand side. You should see a Teachers and Subjects options across the top. Your Years and Classes should already be setup.
If you want to use Subjects, click into Subjects, Add Subject and Create new. Enter the Subject Name and Subject Year then click Save.
To create a Teacher, click Add Teacher and Create. Next, fill in the teacher’s details. Making sure Year and Classes (and Subject, if necessary) are correctly set. Press Save when you are done. Please note, teachers do not need to be invited to the platform.
Step 2 – Creating an Evening
Click the “Evenings” option on the left-hand side. You’ll see a list of any existing Evenings including the date, number of slots and number of bookings that have been made as well as the fill rate.
Let’s start from scratch, click the Create Evening button to begin creating your next parents evening. You’ll need a list of your teachers, dates and times handy for this.
Step 3 – Building an Evening
When building a parents evening, the first thing you need to do is determine how many forms it will be split into. In the case of larger evenings, we recommend building say one form per year as forms with a lot of data can be difficult to manage. Since my evening is small, I am only going to build one form.
The Evening builder is conveniently split into 6 steps, Preferences, Years, Classes/Subjects, Teachers, Custom Appointment Length and Teacher Availability. First, we’ll fill in some basic evening information such as the Title, Description, Standard Appointment Length and set the Open & Close Dates for booking. These are the dates parents will be able to make bookings between – setting it to today’s date means parents will be able to book straight away. Next, we can add the dates the parents evening will take place over. In my case, the 1st and 2nd January between 3:30pm and 6:30pm.
Under Event Preferences, we can choose to make our form available to all parents or target it to the years/classes it is relevant for. This is important in the case of multiple forms, so parents can only see the ones that are relevant to them. If you want to test the evening with your staff account, you will need to assign your user to a year/class that is in the evening, otherwise it won’t display. Click Next.
Now, we can select which Years and Classes/Subjects we’d like to include in our parents evening. We first choose our years, then click Next to choose between Classes and Subjects then select which are relevant to your evening. You might only select a few options here, especially if splitting years across multiple forms. Click Next once you have made your selection.
We can now see a list of all the teachers that will be bookable in the evening, including their Year, Class and Subject. You can choose to either Disable or Change the teacher under the action’s menu on the right. Since this parents evening is over multiple dates, we can use the Apply to all dates toggle at the top to have different teachers for different dates. Toggle this to no, and we see an additional dropdown allowing us to select a date. Mrs Jones isn’t available on the 1srt, so I’m going to disable her on that day. You can see when we click back to our first date, she is still available.
If you’d like to set a custom appointment length for a teacher, you can do so by clicking Add Custom Appointment Length, choosing a teacher and clicking Save. You now need to choose how long you’d like each of that teacher’s appointments to be, this will override the standard appointment length we set in the first step. We can choose to apply this to all dates, or only to some dates, using the toggle at the top.
Finally, the teacher availability tab shows us an overview of our teachers and the times they can be booked. Like before, we can use the dropdown to view the data for each individual date.
Once you are happy with evening, click the save button to save and publish the form.
Step 4 – Alerting Parents
To alert parents, click onto the messages tab on the left-hand side of your dashboard, then click compose message in the top right corner. Input your message title and content, then in the Message Link section select “Link to app section/content” then “Evenings”. You can now target or schedule your message as normal and send when you are ready.