The Staff Path: Set Up Your Community in Four Steps

This is the staff path: your organization runs the community. Membership is by personal invitation only, every family is verified against your records, and the community carries a verified badge throughout the app. Families know everyone they meet belongs there.

Four steps, in order.

1. Activate service and choose your plan

Flip the Activate service toggle and accept the service terms. Until you do, families cannot join your community. The toggle works both ways: you can deactivate whenever you need to.

Then pick your plan. The base carpool service lets families coordinate rides. The Dismissal Plan adds release management on top, useful if your org verifies pickups at release.

2. Set up programs and schedule

This is what makes the app useful to your families before they talk to anyone.

1. Schedules: one per program tier with a distinct start time. Families select the schedule that matches their child, so they only see families with compatible pickup windows.
2. Events and activities: a list you curate. Families tick what applies to their child. A family looking for a soccer carpool will surface others heading to the same activity, not just families nearby.

Schedules = bell times. K-5 dismisses at 2:30, 6-8 at 3:15: that's two schedules.
Activities = everything beyond the bell. Soccer practice, chess club, aftercare: families in the same activity find each other for those hours.

The more completely you fill this in, the more relevant the families your community members see.

3. Build your interest list

Open the Launch Kit and paste your interest form link once: a Google Form, your website's registration page, whatever you already use.

It generates six ready-to-share materials, branded with your community name and logo, all pointing families to that form: email, group-chat text, social post, flyer, yard sign, and newsletter blurb.

As responses come in, you have an interest list: families who want in. Verify them against your roster, and they're who you invite in the next step.

See The Launch Kit for the full breakdown.

4. Invite families

For staff-led communities, families need a personal invitation to join. There is no shared signup link like parent-led communities have. Access is individual, by invitation only.

When you send an invitation, the family gets a personal email with a link to join. Until they use it, they sit in the Invited families list as pending.

That list is where the real work happens:

• Reminder due surfaces anyone who was invited a while back and still hasn't joined. These are the families worth nudging.
• Resend sends them a fresh invitation. The list shows when each family was last invited.
• Revoke cancels an invitation immediately. Invitations expire on their own; this is for the erroneous ones.

Families drop off the list as they join. For everyone still pending: a long-stale invitation means it didn't reach them, landed in spam, or they're not interested. A couple of resends are worth it; after that, let the invitation expire and move on.

Who ends up in your community

Every member passed two gates: they raised their hand on your interest form, and your org sent a personal invite that they used to join, accepting the terms on the way in. No one is visible to your families without both. Contact info for families who never join isn't kept.

Your community contains exactly who you chose, and who chose back. What stays private →

Questions? support@carpool.school