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 will walk you through everything you need to get your centre Mana-ready.

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

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: guidance on further support

⚠️ Exclamation point: take note

Step 1: Login to Mana and accept your invitation to join your centre in Mana

To get started, you’ll need to join your centre’s Mana account.

Option A: If you’re new to Mana, you’ll create your account from the invite email sent by your centre.
Option B: If you already have a Mana account, you’ll simply sign in and accept your centre’s invitation from your settings area.

Option A: Accept your invitation to join Mana as a new user

💡 Already have an account? Jump down to option B

You will receive an email titled Join [your centre's name] on Mana
Within this email there will be a purple button titled Sign in to Mana: click on this button
You will be asked to provide your email address to commence creating your account in Mana.
⚠️ Create your account using the same email address that you were invited to Mana with so that you can immediately access the team you have been added to.
Set up your password for using Mana
⚠️ Your password to Mana will need to be 12 characters long and include an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter and a numerical digit.
You will be asked to verify your email account.
Go to your email and open the email sent to you by LoveHeart Security and tap the link to verify your email address.
💡The verification email may take a few minutes to arrive but if you can't find the email check your junk or spam folder
Back in the Mana app, you can now tap Confirm Verification to continue.
Next, you'll be asked to accept your invite to join your teammates. Tap accept to continue.
Next, you will be asked to provide your First Name and Last Name.
Lastly, you can select your teaching philosophy.
After you provide this information, you will be taken to your Docs page. Welcome!

📖 Read more: How do I accept my invitation to Mana

📖 Read more: How do I set up my Mana Account

Option B: Accept your invitation if you already have a Mana account

💡 Don't have an account? Scroll back up to option A

⚠️ Make sure you log into Mana with the same email address that you were invited to the centre with to view and accept your invitation.
⚠️ If you were invited to Mana with a different email address, you should either:
Create a new Mana account using the email address you were invited with; OR
Ask your Manager to re-issue the invitation to your preferred email address

If you were invited to Mana with the same email address that you used to sign up for Mana with, log in to Mana as normal
Click on your profile icon.
Select Settings
Under your personal tab, select Invitations
Click Accept next to the invitation

Switching between your Mana profiles

💡 You can switch between your Personal, Team, or Parent account at any time:

Click on your profile icon.
Select Switch.
Choose the account from the drop-down menu, or search for it using the search bar.
Click on the account to switch.

📖 Read more: How do I accept my invitation to Mana

Step 2: Familiarise yourself with your Settings page

In the top right hand corner of your screen, click on your profile icon and then click Settings. This will open up a Settings dashboard.

Ensure you work out of the Team Settings to make updates to your Centre's profile in Mana. There are 4 key sections to your Team Management section which we provide detail on throughout this article:

Management
Learning
Features
Analytics

Step 3: Personalise your Team Learning on Mana

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 the Mana supports your way of working.

Start by going to Settings > Team > Learning to view spaces to personalise Mana to your service.

✅ Team Writing Style

Add a writing sample that best represents how you like your centre to write

✅ Team Philosophy

Add your centre’s philosophy

✅ Team Frameworks

Add your centre’s learning framework/s & service type

✅ Coaching

Configure your team’s coaching settings

📖 Read more: Configure team settings

Step 4: Personalise your Features on Mana

Under Settings > Team > Features, you can:

Customise your teams Journeys experience on Mana
Customise your teams' Curriculum experience on Mana
Decide when to enable Mana Families
Decide when to enable Mana Grow

✅ Journeys: Customise Journeys (Cycle of Planning)

If your organisation has an approach they are rolling out for journey stages in Mana, ensure to customise your centre's journey stages to that approach before you commence creating journeys.

Select the default view for journeys your team will have for Mana Journeys (i.e. the individual cycle of planning for each child or individual learning plan for each child).
Select the default journey duration: this should be the length of time that your cycle of planning runs for. We recommend no shorter than 12 weeks.
Select Manage Journey Stages to customise the Journey Stages for your Centre:
- Default journey stages for Australia (EYLF): Family input > Observe & Assess > Plan & Implement > Evaluate & Reflect
- Default journey stages for New Zealand (Te Whāriki): Whānau Aspiration > Notice & Recognise > Respond (Plan) > Evaluate

Example of a default journey for an Australian centre that has selected EYLF as their learning framework:

How to customise stages for your journeys in Mana:

3 vertical dots: Edit / Delete stage (options appear when 3 dots clicked)
Arrow: opens up option to add a Quality Check that instructs Mana on what to assess for as part of that stage in the journey

📖 Read more: What are stages in a journey?

✅ Families: Enable Mana Families

If you plan to invite families to view documents you share with them from the Mana platform, ensure Families is toggled on like so.

✅ Grow: Enable Grow

📖 Read more: Grow Feature Collection

If your organisation is using Mana Grow, enable it for your Centre through the Grow tile.✅ Curricula: Personalise your Curricula Stages ✅ Curricula: Personalise your Curricula Stages

✅ Curricula: Personalise your Curricula Stages

📖 Read more: Curricula Feature Collection

If you are using Mana to support your Room Programming/Room Curriculum development, manage your Curriculum Stages through the Curricula tile.

Step 5: Build your Centre in Mana - add Rooms, add Children and invite your team

✅ Obtain parent and guardian consent to support your Mana rollout

📖 If you are rolling out Mana Teachers only, check out our sample letter and consent form here: A letter to families and consent form (Mana Teachers)

📖 If you are rolling out Mana Teachers and Mana Families, check out our sample letter and consent form here: A letter to families and consent form (Mana Teachers & Mana Families)

Alternatively, use the template provided by your head office (if available).

✅ Add all of your children to Mana via a bulk upload

📖 Read more: How to bulk upload Children into your Centres

This includes a bulk upload csv template.

Remember to obtain family consent before bulk uploading your children into Mana.

✅ 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?

✅ Decide how you want to manage your centre on Mana

In Settings > Team > Management you will have options to customise how your team experiences Mana. Here you can:

Members: Add new team members if they join Mana after your initial onboarding of your team to Mana
Key Children: Manage how educators are assigned children on Mana (key educators)
Key Groups: Manage how educators are assigned to groups (rooms) on Mana
Team Resources: Upload centre specific documents to Mana to improve your teams AI coaching experience

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

💡If you decide to assign children to educators, you need to enable key educator management in Mana.

📖 Read more: Manage key educators

⚠️ 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.