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Scheduling activities

An activity is one thing your organization runs: a class, a field trip, a park day, a week of camp. This guide covers building one, repeating it across a term, and looking after it once families have registered.

Activities is open to owners, co-leaders and event managers, and to nobody else in the organization. See Members, roles, and messaging.

If you intend to charge, finish payouts first. A ticket cannot carry a price above $0 until your organization can accept money — see Getting paid.

Create an activity​

  1. Open the account menu and choose Manage organizations.
  2. Select your organization.
  3. Open Activities in the console.
  4. Start a new activity.
  5. Work down the form and save.

The form is one page of sections. Everything below is a decision on it.

The basics​

Give the activity a name, a description, the date and time it starts and finishes, and where it happens.

Write the description for a family who has never met you. Three things get asked by message every time: what happens in the session, what a child should bring, and what a first-timer should expect. Answer them here and you save yourself the message.

Who can see it​

Visibility is a required choice, and it is the one most often set wrong.

ChoiceWho can find it
PublicAnyone. It appears in search, on the map, and on your organization's page.
Members onlyYour members. It is hidden from everyone else rather than locked — a non-member never sees that it exists.
UnlistedOnly people you send the link to. It is never listed anywhere, including on your own page.

Choose Members only for something that is genuinely part of membership. Choose Unlisted for a private session, a make-up class, or a date you are arranging with two families by message.

If you pick Members only or Unlisted and then wonder why nothing is filling, this is the reason. Nobody is refusing to register. They cannot see it.

Categories​

Every activity needs at least one category, and can carry up to five.

They come from a fixed list Famlo maintains. You cannot write your own, and there are no per-organization categories to set up in settings. Pick the ones a family would actually search for. Adding five that only half apply makes your listing harder to trust, not easier to find.

Ages​

Set the age range the activity is really for.

Families filter by age band — Preschool, Elementary, Middle and High — so an accurate range is what puts you in front of the right people. See Finding activities.

The range is advice, not a gate. Famlo never blocks a registration because of a child's age. A family registering a child outside your range is asked to confirm, and the registration goes through. If an age limit is a hard requirement, say so in the description and expect to have the conversation yourself.

Price​

Pricing lives in the Tickets & Pricing section of the same form. Capacity lives there too, on each ticket row, because a ticket is what actually runs out.

See Tickets and pricing for ticket types, scopes, add-ons and what to charge.

Terms families accept before registering​

You can require a family to accept your own terms before they register. A liability waiver, a photo release, a code of conduct, an acknowledgement that they have read your allergy policy.

It is a block of text you write, and a Required checkbox.

  • With Required ticked, a family cannot complete registration without accepting.
  • With it unticked, the text is shown for information.

There are no templates to load and no variables that fill themselves in. Write the words you want, and paste them into the next activity that needs them. Famlo's own platform terms are separate and always apply.

Scholarship money​

Whether an award can pay for this activity is decided here, for the whole activity. Turning scholarship payments on makes every ticket on it payable from an award.

See Scholarships.

Repeat it across a term​

A repeating activity is how you schedule a term of a weekly class without creating twelve activities by hand.

  1. Tick the repeats option on the activity form.
  2. Set Repeats — Weekly, Every 2 weeks or Monthly.
  3. Set Every — the interval that goes with it.
  4. Set Repeats until — the last date in the run.
  5. Save, then look at the dates you got before you tell anyone the schedule.

A run cannot be longer than 60 occurrences. A weekly class therefore covers a bit over a year at most, which is more than a term either way.

What repeating does not do​

  • There is no daily option. Weekly, Every 2 weeks and Monthly are the whole list.
  • There is no day-of-week picker. A class that meets Tuesdays and Thursdays is two activities.
  • There is no preview of the dates before you save, and no way to exclude a holiday from the middle of a run. If your term has a break in it, put the break in the description and send an announcement closer to the date.
  • There is no series dashboard. A run is managed as the activity it belongs to.

What a repeat actually creates​

Each date is its own occurrence, with its own registrations. A family registers for each date separately, and a date's roster is the bookings for that date alone.

:::warning A series pass reserves nothing Series pass is a label on a ticket. It changes the words a family reads and nothing else — no seat is held, at any session.

Selling a twelve-week pass does not book those twelve dates. A pass holder appears on a date's roster only if they registered for that date, exactly like everyone else.

If you need the same children in the room every week, say so plainly in the description, and check each date's roster rather than assuming it. :::

Manage it once it is live​

There are four things you can do to a published activity:

  • Open its public page and read it as a family sees it.
  • Edit it.
  • Cancel it.
  • Delete it.

That is the whole list. There is no attendee export, no way to add someone to the roster by hand, no walk-in registration, no attendance report, no post-event feedback request, no copy-this-activity, and no switch that closes registration early.

Editing​

Edit the activity and save. The public page changes immediately.

Changing the date, the time or the place of something people have already registered for is worth saying out loud. Do not rely on the change announcing itself — send an announcement to everyone registered, in your own words.

Changing a ticket price never touches a booking that has already been paid. See Tickets and pricing.

Who has registered​

The activity's console page carries the roster. Beside the Roster heading sits Take attendance, which opens the list of meetings for that activity.

A repeating activity lists its whole term there, one meeting per date, and each meeting's roster is read fresh from the bookings for that date. See Attendance and check-in.

When it fills up​

Capacity is set on the ticket, so an activity is full when its tickets have run out. Your activity list shows registrations against capacity, so you can see how full each date is at a glance.

A full activity closes rather than queuing anyone. The button families see changes to Join the waitlist. Until somebody joins, the page reads "This event is full — be the first on the waitlist." After that it counts them: "N are waiting for a spot."

Famlo uses the word waitlist because that is the word families use. It is not a queue. Nobody holds a position, nobody is next in line, and nobody is promoted into a place. When a spot opens — a family cancels, or you raise a ticket's capacity — everyone watching is told at the same moment, and the first to register takes it.

That count is your honest measure of demand. If it stays high, raise the capacity on the ticket or schedule the activity again. See Saved activities and alerts for what this looks like from the family's side.

Cancel an activity​

  1. Open the activity from Activities.
  2. Choose Cancel activity.
  3. Confirm.

Everyone registered is notified, and the activity is unpublished.

Follow it with an announcement if the reason matters — a cancellation notice tells a family what happened, not why.

What happens to the money​

You do not choose. There is no partial refund, no refund amount to type, and no "issue refund" action anywhere in Famlo.

Cancelling makes every family whole:

  • Whatever their card was charged comes back in full.
  • The platform fee on those bookings is refunded too, so cancelling does not cost you the fee.
  • Account credit returns to the family's balance, and scholarship coverage returns to their award, ready to spend again.

The 24-hour cutoff that decides what a family gets back when they cancel does not apply to you. Neither does No Refunds: that setting governs a family cancelling their own booking, and cancelling the activity refunds them regardless.

See Payments and refunds for the family's view of the same rules.

Cancel or delete?​

Cancel first, every time. Cancelling is what notifies families and returns their money. Deleting is for an activity nobody has registered for — a duplicate, or a date you created by mistake.

Troubleshooting​

Families tell me they cannot find the activity. Check its visibility. Members only hides it from everyone who is not a member, and Unlisted keeps it out of every listing including your own page.

A family says they bought a pass but is not on this week's roster. Each date is registered separately, whatever the ticket is called. Check that date's roster and tell them which dates they still need to register for.

My repeating activity stopped before the end of the term. Check Repeats until, and remember a run stops at 60 occurrences.

I need to skip a week for a holiday. There is no way to exclude a date from a run. Say it in the description, and send an announcement before the date.

I cannot find an export of who is coming. There is not one. The roster on screen is the list. See Insights.

Someone paid me in cash and I want to add them to the roster. There is no manual add and no walk-in registration. They have to register themselves, and you record the money as an offline payment.

I want to stop taking registrations before the date. There is no control for that. Capacity on the ticket is the only limit Famlo enforces.

I cannot see Activities in the console at all. Your role does not include it. Owners, co-leaders and event managers can open Activities; member managers, billing managers and members cannot.

What's next​