Availability & Meetings

A tour form is only half of a tour. The other half is the calendar: the CRM has to actually know when you are free, what kinds of meetings you offer, and where they happen. Until you set that up, the form has nothing to hand the parent. This chapter wires that second half in.

Forms ask "do you want to come see us?" Meetings answer "great, here is when." Without this chapter, the booking flow has no times to show.

Two pieces do the work. Availability is the schedule (the days, times, and timezone you are open to taking meetings). Meeting types are the bookable things that sit on top of that schedule (a school tour, a virtual intro, a consultation). You build availability first, then attach it to a meeting type. After that you have a real booking link to hand parents.

Availability vs Meeting Types (the two-piece setup)

People mix these up constantly. They look related, and they are, but they answer different questions. The easiest way to keep them straight is to look at what each one is actually deciding.

You can have one availability that every meeting type shares, or a different schedule per meeting type. Most schools start with one and split it later if a specific meeting (like virtual intro calls in the evening) needs different hours.

1. Setting your availability

Open Meetings in the left sidebar, then the Availability tab. Click + New Availability in the top right. Give it a name you'll recognize later (like General availability or Evening tours), pick your timezone, and set the days and times you're open for meetings each week.

2. Connecting your calendar (so you don't double-book)

Inside the availability editor, scroll to Calendar Settings and toggle on Sync Meeting Bookings and Conflicts. This is the part that makes the CRM play nicely with the calendar you already live in (Google or Outlook). Two settings come with it, and they do different jobs.

Don't see your calendar in the dropdown? Click Manage calendar connections at the top of the Calendar Settings section. It'll drop you into CRM Settings where you can add a Google or Outlook connection. Come back to availability after.

3. Building a meeting type

Back in Meetings, switch to the Meeting Types tab and click Add Meeting Type. This is the form that turns your availability into something a parent can actually book. Six fields, each one doing a specific job.

Booking notice and slot limits (the settings most people miss)

After you save, you land inside the meeting type editor. Scroll to Booking settings. There are three numbers here worth thinking about.

What happens after they book

Under Success page, the After a lead books dropdown lets you either show a built-in success page (with your own title and message) or redirect them to any URL you want. A welcome video, a "what to expect on your tour" page, a map with parking instructions, anything that turns a booking confirmation into something useful.

4. Communication (reminders, follow-ups, and tasks)

Inside the meeting type editor there's a tab called Communication. This is where you set up everything that should happen around the meeting without you having to remember: the confirmation email when they book, the SMS reminder the morning of, the thank-you email after, the internal task that tells your team to log notes. It looks a lot like the automations chapter that's coming up, and that's on purpose. It's a mini automation engine scoped to one meeting type.

Think of this as automations-lite. You're not building flows across your whole CRM yet, you're just saying "for this specific tour, here's what should fire and when." Most of the day-to-day follow-up parents experience lives right here.

Confirmation email (the one that goes out immediately)

The top section is Confirmation email(s). Toggle it on and pick either Use the default confirmation email (a clean, generic "you're booked" message) or Choose an email template to use one of your branded templates from the email library. Additional recipients lets you CC your director, the lead teacher, or whoever should know a tour just got booked, so nobody finds out from a calendar invite alone.

Pre-meeting reminders and post-meeting follow-ups

Below confirmations is Pre-meeting reminder / Post-meeting follow-up. Click Add a reminder or follow-up and you get a small row of dropdowns that lets you build any single action. Stack as many of these as you want.

A reasonable starting stack

If you're not sure what to set up, this is a good default for a school tour:

You can always come back and add, remove, or retime any of these. Nothing here is permanent, and changes only affect bookings made after you save.

5. Sharing the booking link

Once the meeting type is saved, you have a real booking link. Three ways to get it in front of families, and most schools use more than one.

Making the embedded booking page look like yours

Click Embed code above and the branding panel opens: a Custom theme toggle, accent color, font, and your school logo at the top.

Worth repeating: this is embed only. If you send the share link or print the QR code, families get the standard Playground booking page with no logo or custom colors.

6. What the parent sees after they book

The booking link is where your work becomes the family's experience, so it is worth seeing exactly what they get. The second they pick a time, the page turns into a confirmation: a big green check, You're all set!, and a card with the meeting name, the day and time in their timezone, and where it happens. Confetti and all. The same confirmation email drops in their inbox with a link back to this page.

That card is not a dead end. It keeps two buttons live for the family: Reschedule, which reopens your availability so they can only move to a time you are actually free, and Cancel, which asks them a required Reason for cancellation before it will let them through. Once they confirm, the page flips to a red Your meeting is cancelled state with the old time struck through, and offers Book a new meeting so the family can put themselves right back on your calendar instead of disappearing.

Both actions write back to the CRM the moment they happen, so a rescheduled tour moves on your calendar and a cancelled one stops firing reminders. You do not have to clean it up by hand, but you do have to look, because a cancellation is the single best moment to reach out while the family is still deciding.

7. Booking a meeting for a parent yourself

Sometimes a parent calls or emails instead of using the link, and you just need to put them on the calendar. You don't have to send them back to the form. Open the lead's profile from the Leads tab, click Schedule in the top right, pick the meeting type, and choose a date and time. It uses the same availability and the same automations as if the parent had booked it themselves, so any confirmation email or reminder still fires, and the family still gets the confirmation page above.

8. Recording the meeting outcome (this is the one people miss)

A meeting on the calendar is not the end of the story. Once the day comes and goes, somebody has to tell the CRM what actually happened, did the family show up, or not. That single click is what unlocks most of your post-tour automations. If nobody marks the outcome, the CRM assumes nothing changed and your no-show follow-ups, tour thank-yous, and stage-based nurtures never fire.

Marking a meeting Completed or No-show is not paperwork. It is the trigger. Any automation that reacts to "tour happened" or "they ghosted" is waiting for you to record that outcome.

Where to do it (the fast way)

The easiest place is the Meetings section itself. Open Bookings, switch to the Past tab, find the meeting, and click the three-dot menu on the right. You will see Reschedule and Record outcome. You can also do it from the Calendar tab by clicking the meeting block and hitting Record outcome in the popover. Most admins live in the calendar, so the calendar path is the one your team will actually use. If the outcome is No show, the form also gives you a checkbox to remove incomplete tasks connected to that meeting.

The four fields on the outcome form

What's next

Chapter 9 is Automations. By now you've covered Forms (Chapter 3) and Tasks (Chapter 7), and that chapter is where the CRM starts doing that work for you: creating tasks, sending reminders, and updating stages automatically whenever a meeting is booked or a tour outcome is recorded.