# Getting started as an admin

This guide walks you through the first hour as a Votare admin: standing up your organization, bringing your team in, defining who can do what, and enabling the features your team actually uses. Everything here lives inside your organization's Settings and the left sidebar, and each step links to a deeper guide if you want more detail.

## 1. Create your organization

An organization is your workspace — its own members, settings, events, and public pages. When you create one you set:

- **Name** — the display name shown across the product and on public pages.
- **URL slug** — the short identifier in your organization's web address. Choose it carefully; changing it later changes your URLs.
- **Logo and icon** — used in navigation, on public pages, and in emails.
- **Description** — a short summary of what the organization is for.
- **Visibility** — controls who can see your public pages (see below).

You can revisit any of these later in [Organization settings & branding](/docs/admin/settings-and-branding).

### Choose your visibility

Visibility decides how discoverable your organization's public pages are:

| Visibility | Who can access | Indexed by search engines |
|------------|----------------|---------------------------|
| Public | Anyone with the link | Yes — listed in your sitemap and crawlable |
| Unlisted | Anyone with the direct link | No — link-only, not indexed |
| Private | Members only | No |

Only **public** organizations are crawlable and appear in the sitemap. Choose **unlisted** if you want to share a link without it showing up in search results, or **private** if the organization should stay entirely internal.

## 2. Invite your team

There are two ways to bring people in, and you can use both.

### Invite by email

From **Settings → Members**, send invitations to individual email addresses. Each invitation:

- Expires 30 days after it is sent.
- Can be resent if it expires or gets lost.
- Shows a status of pending, accepted, or expired so you can track who still needs to join.

### Share an invite code or link

For bulk onboarding, generate an invite code or link instead of typing addresses one at a time. Invite codes are configurable:

- Set an **expiry** so the code stops working after a date.
- Set a **maximum number of uses** to cap how many people can join with it.
- Make it **one-time** so it works for a single person and then closes.

Share the link in your team chat or onboarding docs and let people join themselves. For the full breakdown, see [Members, roles & groups](/docs/admin/members-and-roles).

## 3. Assign roles

Every member has a base role that sets their overall level of control:

- **Owner** — full control, including deleting the organization and owner-only permissions.
- **Admin** — manages members, settings, and most features.
- **Member** — the default role; participates in the features you enable.

For finer-grained access — like letting one person edit Planner allocations or organize a single event — use scoped role assignments rather than promoting people to admin. Those are covered in detail in [Members, roles & groups](/docs/admin/members-and-roles).

## 4. Organize members into groups

Member groups (also called tags) are named collections such as **Dev**, **Design**, or **PM**. A person can belong to several groups at once, and groups do real work across the product:

- **Weekly MVP voting** runs per group — each group votes among its own members.
- **Events** are scoped to groups — only members of the relevant group can RSVP or be selected.
- **Report visibility** can be limited to specific groups.

Setting up your groups early makes the rest of the configuration — voting, events, reports — fall into place.

## 5. Configure business hours and calendar

Your organization's working rhythm feeds the Planner's capacity math, so it is worth getting right:

- **Business hours** — the hours your team is expected to be working.
- **Timezone** — the reference timezone for scheduling and capacity.
- **Holidays** — non-working days that reduce available capacity.

Together these determine how much capacity the Planner assumes each person has. You can adjust them any time in [Organization settings & branding](/docs/admin/settings-and-branding).

## 6. Set up portfolio groups

Portfolio groups represent your departments or divisions. They scope projects and the portfolio view, so you can slice work by department rather than seeing everything in one flat list. Create the departments that match your org structure before you start adding projects.

## 7. Turn on the features you need

Votare is modular — enable only the parts your team will use. Available features include:

- **Hackathons** — run internal hackathons with project submissions and voting.
- **Events** — schedule events, manage RSVPs, and select participants from groups.
- **Weekly MVP voting** — let each group vote on its most valuable player.
- **Planner** — allocate people to work against real capacity.
- **Projects and roadmaps** — track initiatives and plan ahead.
- **Documents** — share and sign documents with terms snapshots.
- **Time tracker** — record time against work.
- **Reports** — author and share monthly reports.

Enable what fits today; you can turn more on as your team grows.

## Next steps

- Fine-tune your public presence and defaults in [Organization settings & branding](/docs/admin/settings-and-branding).
- Get access control right with [Members, roles & groups](/docs/admin/members-and-roles).
- Understand what gets recorded and how the platform stays secure in [Audit logs, email logs & security](/docs/admin/audit-and-security).

## Related

- [Members, roles & groups](/docs/admin/members-and-roles)
- [Organization settings & branding](/docs/admin/settings-and-branding)
- [Audit logs, email logs & security](/docs/admin/audit-and-security)