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.

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 where you confirm your plan, enter your school name and work email, and add your purchase order number if your school issues one. We prepare your onboarding packet — the order summary and our agreements — and email you the links to review and sign.

The packet is signed in three parts, and all three are required. (A free week signs a single one-page agreement instead — see above.)

1. Commercial Terms — the Master SaaS & Services Agreement, your Order Form, and the pricing schedule.
2. Data Processing — the FERPA Data Processing Agreement and the Privacy Policy.
3. 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.

Three parts rather than one because the signing platform will not take an 88-page document as a single file — not because they are 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 your welcome snippet — 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

The welcome email has a one-line snippet — paste it just before </body> on your site. Elira appears as a chat bubble and answers enrollment questions using your school's info — in English, Spanish, and Arabic, with event flyers and in-chat tour booking. 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 my install snippet re-sends the whole setup email — snippet, your contact numbers, and the remaining steps — to the account address. It also finishes the widget build if that had not completed.

3. Work through the setup checklist

Your dashboard opens with a checklist covering everything Elira needs before going live — each item has its own walkthrough:

• School info + IEP director
• Phone number sync — calls show YOUR office number
• Google Calendar — in-chat bookings land on your calendar
• SchoolMint — the secure staff-account handoff (no API key)
• Google Sheets tracker
• Email domain — a small job for your IT person

4. Request go-live

Until go-live, everything runs in a safe dry mode — sequences simulate, nothing reaches a real family. When every checklist item is green, the Request go-live button unlocks; we do a final review together and flip Elira live.