Get started with AskElira Schools
From sign-up to a live Elira on your site: the setup path in order.
Here's the path from sign-up to enrollment running itself.
Prefer to watch? For charter and private schools, Sign your agreement, then sign in (1:50, with captions) walks through signing all three parts and your first sign-in. The same video appears on your onboarding packet page; every tutorial is under Tutorials on the support page.
Try it free first
You don't have to start with a contract. Start a free 7-day week and Elira reads your real SchoolMint applicants and drafts every message she'd send — without sending any of them. See Starting with a free observation week for what it covers and what happens after. The rest of this article is the paid path.
1. Sign your agreement
It starts with a walkthrough — we show you the platform and go through plans and pricing together. Afterward we send you an onboarding link. There you enter your school name, work email and website, answer Where is your school? and Type of school, confirm your plan, and add your purchase order number if your school issues one. Press Review & sign → and you go straight to your onboarding packet — the order summary and our agreements. We also email you the links.
The packet is signed in three parts, and all three are required. (A free week signs one short agreement instead — see above.)
- Commercial Terms — the Master SaaS & Services Agreement, your Order Form, and the pricing schedule.
- Data Processing — the FERPA Data Processing Agreement and the Privacy Policy.
- New York § 2-d and Family Communications — the § 2-d Addendum with its Data Security & Privacy Plan and Parents' Bill of Rights supplement, the TCPA consent scripting, and the guardian consent language.
A private or independent school chooses *Private / independent school* on the form and receives a separate account. Part 3 is the New York Private School Data Security and Privacy Addendum, rather than the charter § 2-d Addendum; the free observation week is not offered. It is not emailed a widget code. Charter enrollment tools do not apply. Contact our team for help with your account.
Three parts is simply how the signing works — they are not separate deals. Together they are one agreement, they share one Order Form, and they take effect together. Each part takes about two minutes for an authorized signer (Head of School, Director of Operations, or similar). You can read all of it beforehand at schools.askelira.com/legal — nothing in the parts differs from what is published there.
Nobody is asked for a card. Once the last part is in, your account opens, we build your Elira widget and email you the code for it — and we send your business office an invoice, payable in 30 days by bank transfer, check, or card if you'd rather. See Plans, billing, and cancellation for the payment details, your PO, and where to find the invoice number.
2. Add Elira to your website
Your one-line code is on Settings, with a copy button, and in your welcome email — paste it just before </body> on your site. Try the window first from the *Try Elira before families do* card in step 6, Try Elira on your website, on Build Elira's Brain. Elira appears as a chat bubble and answers enrollment questions using your school's info — in English, Spanish, and Arabic, with event flyers and a contact form for office follow-up. See what the widget can do.
Lost the email, or it went to whoever set up billing rather than whoever runs the website? On Settings, Email me the code re-sends the whole setup email — the code, your contact numbers, and the remaining steps — to the account address. It also finishes the widget build if that had not completed. Only the account owner can use it.
3. Work through the Connect Elira steps
On the day you sign, we take you straight to Build Elira's Brain rather than the full dashboard, so there is one page and one list to work through. After your first step, your dashboard carries one line and one button back to it. The second section of that list — Connect Elira — covers everything Elira needs before going live, and each item has its own walkthrough:
- Your two required policies — your § 2-d Addendum does not take effect until both are attached
- School year, registration deadline + IEP director
- Show your office number on calls — calls show YOUR office number
- SchoolMint — the secure staff-account handoff (no API key)
- Google Sheets tracker
- Email domain — a small job for your IT person
- Your first applicant list
4. Request go-live
Until go-live, Elira prepares every message but sends nothing — no text, call or email reaches a real family. When every one of the Connect Elira steps on Build Elira's Brain is green, the Request go-live button at the bottom of that same page unlocks; we do a final review together, and nothing reaches a family until AskElira approves it.