Welcome to your Mana journey! As leaders at your centre, you play a key role in bringing Mana to life. Setting things up properly now means less admin later, smoother workflows for your team and more time to focus on what matters most: supporting children's learning and growth.

This guide is for Centre Managers and Educational Leaders at a centre within a broader organisation, where head office will invite teachers/educators and bulk upload children (head office led activation). You'll need a Manager role on your centre's Mana team to complete these steps. It walks you through everything you need to get your centre Mana-ready.

Some steps may already be taken care of by your organisation: check in with your Mana point of contact if you're unsure.

To get the best out of training, we recommend you complete all actions in this guide before your centre's training session.

💡 Not the right guide for you?

If your centre is onboarding its own teachers and uploading its own children, use Activating Mana at a centre level (centre-led activation) instead.
If you're a single, independent centre, use Activating Mana as a single centre.
If you're driving the rollout across an organisation, use Activating Mana at an organisational level.
If you're a teacher or educator, use Activating Mana as a teacher or educator within a centre.

You will need:

access to your centre's Mana team with a Manager role (your invitation comes from head office)
your centre's philosophy, a writing sample, and your learning framework/s
your room structure and the list of which children belong to which rooms (head office uploads the children themselves)

To start, let's bookmark the Mana help centre, your one-stop shop for all of your ongoing Mana support needs: https://help.makemana.com/en/

You will see these icons used throughout the guide:

✅ Green tick: key action to complete

📖 Book: read more for further support

💡 Light bulb: tips & tricks

⚠️ Exclamation point: take note

Centre Setup

Centre setup covers confirming your team, structuring your rooms and setting up journeys. Head office has already invited your educators and uploaded your children — your job is to check and organise.

✅ Confirm your educators have accepted their invites to join Mana

📖 Read more: Manage team members

✅ Success check: every educator appears in your Members list without a pending invitation. If an educator hasn't received their invite, ask them to check junk/spam and confirm the email address, then ask your head office Mana contact to re-send it.

Members list showing invitation status for each educator

✅ Set up your centre's rooms in Mana and assign children to rooms

📖 Read more: How do I create a room/group and add children?

Creating a new group or room in Curricula

✅ Set up your centre's stages for journeys (note: 'journeys' in Mana signifies your cycle of planning, or individual learning plans)

⚠️ If your organisation has a standard set of journey stages, apply that approach before your team starts creating journeys.

✅ Decide whether to assign children to educators, or ask educators to mark their key children themselves

💡 A key educator is the educator responsible for a child's planning in Mana; their assigned children are their key children. If you decide to assign children to educators, you need to enable key educator management in Mana.

📖 Read more: Add children and mark key children

⚠️ Note: if you enable this, educators will not be able to assign children to themselves, this will need to be done by management. If you decide that educators should assign children to themselves, they will be guided on how to do this in their activation material.

Centre Personalisation

✅ Finally, personalise Mana to your centre:

This is where the magic starts to take place! Personalising Mana to your centre makes the platform more meaningful and effective. Every centre has its own routines, culture, and priorities: when Mana reflects that, educators see information that feels relevant, families feel more connected, and Mana supports your way of working.

📖 Read more: Configure team settings

✅ Add your centre's writing style (if applicable)

Team writing style setting with a writing sample field

✅ Add your centre's philosophy

✅ Add your centre's learning framework/s

Learning framework selection in team settings

✅ Add your centre's service type

✅ Configure your team's coaching settings

You're ready for training when...

You have completed head office led activation when:

✅ All educators have accepted their invitations
✅ Rooms are set up and children are assigned to rooms
✅ Journey stages match your organisation's approach
✅ You've decided how key children will be assigned
✅ Writing style, philosophy, framework, service type and coaching settings reflect your centre

If a step was already completed by head office, simply confirm it looks right. If any step didn't work as described, contact us using the options below.

Need more help?

The Mana team is not far away if you need help with setup:

📰 Visit the Mana help centre, your one-stop shop for all Mana support needs
💬 Chat with us in the Mana app: tap your Profile icon, select Help & Support, then choose "Talk to a human"
📧 Email us at [email protected]

Activating Mana at a centre level (head office led activation)