With Element451 Appointments, you can easily schedule and handle one-on-one meetings with students, colleagues, and other important stakeholders like parents, alums, and influencers. Key features include:

Overall, Appointments in Element451 offers a powerful and convenient tool to help manage your appointments. Let's get yours set up!

Several key terms are helpful to understand before you start configuring Appointments.

Categories: Use Appointment Categories as a top-level tag or label to help organize your appointments. You might use Categories to align with departments or use cases.

Types: Appointment Types allow you to configure shared information when one or more users can host a specific appointment type. For example, you may have four academic advisors available for Office Hours. In this case, Office Hours become one of your Appointment Types.

Availability: Staff can each set their own availability. Each Availability is tied to a user and a Type. This means one staff member can offer different times for different appointment types. For example, you could conduct Office Hours each week on Mondays and Thursdays from 1 pm-5 pm and Admission Interviews on Mondays - Fridays 10 am-2 pm. Admins can edit or delete any user's availability after creation.

Appointment: An Appointment is the base item within the Appointments Module. An Appointment is created when someone books an appointment type with a specific staff member. Appointments are connected to the Contact record.

Before using the Appointments module, Element Captains or Appointment Admins must complete a few minor configurations:

Similar to the Events module, we provide you with an Appointment Booking site where students, colleagues, and others can schedule an appointment with you. The site is designed to be implemented quickly and easily.

To configure your school's Appointment Booking site, click on the More menu in the Appointments header and select Page Settings.

This will open a Page Settings sheet. You can configure all the settings needed to launch your booking site from here.

Your site comes with a default domain. This will be your primary website URL.

Like pages and events, you can work with your IT department to set up a CNAME entry to customize the URL. The CNAME record in your DNS tool must point your external domain to appointment451.sites.451.io. For more information on creating CNAME entries, visit this help article.

Once your CNAME entry has been established, you can add the domain name by clicking the + Add Host button.

Your Appointments page will have pre-populated images using your branding content tokens. If you wish to edit those, hover over the image and click remove. You can then select an image from your media manager or upload a new one.

Below is a preview of what your branded page will look like:

If you utilize the live chat widget within Element451 and wish to enable it on your booking page, simply toggle on the Element Messenger option.

The footer information is pre-populated using your school's information. You can adjust this information to display differently on your Appointments page if needed.

A custom thank you message is displayed on the confirmation page after an invitee schedules their appointment. You can customize this message by adding your own text to the title and description for the Thank You Note setting.

To configure your Categories, click on the more menu (three dots) in the Appointments header and select Categories. Element451 delivers 3 sample Categories (Admissions, Financial Assistance & Advising). You can use these categories or delete them from your instance and add new custom Categories.

To configure your Types, navigate to the left-hand Appointment Settings menu and select Types.

Appointment types can be thought of as templates for your users. When adding Types, think about those routine appointments offered by your team. Element451 delivers 3 sample Types (Admissions Interview, Advising Office Hours, and FAFSA Help). You can use these Types or delete them from your instance and add custom new Types.

Once Categories and Appointment Types have been configured, your users can set their availability. Only users can add their availability, while administrators can edit/delete availability for all users.

To view and edit a user's availability:

Before a user can begin utilizing the Appointments module, they must set their availability.

For a list of commonly asked questions about the functionality of the Appointments Module, visit our FAQ help article.