Setting up a Club

This article provides a step-by-step guide on setting up clubs using Arbor's Clubs feature, including adding clubs, scheduling sessions, and managing membership periods and pricing. It emphasizes the importance of having card payment options enabled and outlines the necessary permissions for administrators. The article also includes tips for managing multiple sessions and pricing structures effectively.

With Arbor's Clubs feature, you can get parents to pay for individual sessions in advance through the Parent Portal and Parent App, and group pricing by week, month, terms etc.

Top Tip: Make sure you have set up Card Payments on your site to allow payments via card.

Permissions required

If you don't have these permissions, ask your admin team to assign them to you.

• Extra Curricular: Administer - Set up a club.
• Finance: Administer - Manage payments into the club.

Step 1 - Adding a new Club

Go to School > Activities > Clubs. This will bring you to the Clubs overview page. From here you can view the clubs you have already created in school.

Click on the green '+Add' button and select whether the club will be paid or free.

A slide over will appear for you to enter details about the club you creating.

Enter:

• The club name
• A short description of the club (optional)
• Which pupils are eligible (click on the arrow for a drop-down list of choices). Top Tip: See how to add students who will be attending next year here: Custom Group for Clubs next year
• The Maximum number or Participants - this is the maximum students per each club session, not anyone who has attendance the club at any point.
• Whether parental consent is required. See further details here: Club consents and collection arrangements
• Whether to take attendance or not

Then click the green 'Save' button. Your club will now be listed on the Clubs overview page.

Step 2 - Adding sessions

Click on +Add in the sessions box to schedule sessions for the club. You'll be asked whether you want to schedule Weekly Sessions or Single Session(s).

• Choose Weekly Sessions to schedule repeating sessions, for example, every Monday.
• Choose Single Session(s) if the dates and times of club do not repeat on a weekly basis.

Weekly Sessions

If you've chosen weekly sessions, choose the day(s) of the week you'd like to schedule club sessions. Enter the start and end time of the sessions, and the dates they run between. You can also add details of the location of the session (you can only select one room here) and staff members if needed. When ready, click Save Changes to schedule the sessions.

You can review the sessions you've created from the section on the Club page.

Single Sessions

In the slide over, enter the information for the sessions you'd like to schedule into the table. You can add as many extra rows as you like by clicking Add. Once you're done, click Save to schedule the sessions. 

Step 3 - Adding Membership Periods and Prices

Click on +Add to enter information on the cost and how many sessions the price is for. 

• If you want parents to be able to select specific sessions, set up a daily membership period.
• If you want parents to sign up and pay for sessions in bulk, set up e.g. a termly membership period.
• You can set up both types if you want to give parents either option, but please note parents can't purchase a termly period if they've already purchased a daily session that falls in that term's date range.

• Membership Period - the "unit" of time that a student can belong to a club. If a student can attend a club day by day, choose the day. Other options are Week, Month, Term and Year. 
• Membership name - Make sure the membership name is clear and obvious as to what the club membership means, as this is what guardians will see on the Parent Portal or Parent App.
• Available From & Available To - These dates determine how many Membership Periods a student can sign up to, e.g. if a Membership Period was a Term, and it was available throughout the year, a student can register for three terms.
• Pricing Basis - This specifies whether the price is calculated per session, or for the whole Membership Period. E.g. Swimming club could be £3 per session or £30 for a Term. 
• Variable contribution - Ticking this box allows parents to pay what they can for club attendance, rather than a set price.

This is also where you can opt to have guardians sign their children up via your Parent Portal. Add in the dates that guardians should be able to book on the Parent Portal or Parent App. Arbor won’t automatically email parents to tell them they can sign up, so you would need to let them know via email, SMS or in-app message.

Repeat this process to set up any other different prices. 

Top Tip: When creating another membership, if the Period chosen and the Pricing Basis are the same, your first membership will be overwritten. Make sure to set them with slightly different availability dates to prevent this.

Signing students up for the club

To sign students up to the club, you can record payments or just sign the student up for the payment to be added later. You can see how to do this here: Manually signing students up to a club

If you use the Parent Portal and Parent App at your school and have allowed parents to sign up through there, they can sign their children up using these instructions: Signing my child up for a Club on the Parent Portal or Parent App