How Roost works

Visible to other members

You appear in member searches, on class lists, on grade lists (where they apply), and in the main directory browse. Other members can see whichever contact info you've chosen to share (email, phone, address — each is a separate toggle). This is what most opted-in members pick.

Private

You can still search and see other members yourself, but no one can find you. You don't appear in browse, search, or class/grade lists. One-way visibility: you reach out; nobody reaches in. The only exceptions are people who share a circle with you (see #3) and administrators (see #12). Note: Private still lets your organization's broadcast emails reach you — those are decoupled from your sharing setting on purpose. See §13 for why, and how to silence broadcasts separately.

Opt out

You won't be in the directory and you won't be able to see other members. The strictest option — you're effectively outside the directory entirely until you change this. Useful if you don't want any participation right now and would rather opt back in later. One thing this doesn't do: it doesn't take you off the broadcast email list. Use the unsubscribe link in any broadcast for that — see §13.

Your organization picks the starting default — some start everyone at Private and let members opt in; others start at Visible to other members and let members opt out. You can always change yours after.

There's a fourth scope called Listing-only that you might see referenced elsewhere. It's not something you pick from your profile — it's a system-assigned scope used for limited accounts (for example, a babysitter a member recommended via Trusted Help). It exists so a non-member can be reachable through a listing without joining the full directory.

All members in the directory

Every member in the directory at your organization can see you. This is the default for most opted-in members — it mirrors how the old paper school directory worked.

Only guardians in my children's grade(s)

All guardians whose kids are in the same grade as yours. Wider than class but narrower than the whole organization. Useful for middle and high school where homerooms don't mean what they did in elementary. Only shown if your directory has grades and you have children in it.

Only guardians in my children's classes

Only the guardians of your children's classmates can see you. If you have kids in multiple classes, all of those classes count. Best for members who want to connect with the immediate classroom crowd and nobody else. Only shown if your directory has classes and you have children in it.

• Only you see your circles. Other members can't see which circles they're in, and they can't see your circles at all. Adding someone to a circle doesn't notify them.
• You only end up in a circle if the owner could find you when they added you. Someone can't add you to their circle if you weren't findable at the time. So your visibility settings still control who can even start a circle that includes you.
• Circles let an owner keep seeing you even if you go Private later. If a circle owner could see you when they added you and you later change your sharing to Private, you stay in their circle — but only your name shows. None of your contact info follows. The chip on your card explains why they can still see you at all.
• Cross-organization works. If you're a member at more than one organization in your district, a circle can include people from any organization you have access to.
• Send to a circle. “Email this circle” sends one BCC'd email to everyone in the circle. Saves you from looking up each email one by one.

Shared circles — a group that can see each other

A shared circle works differently from a personal one: everyone in it can see the other members. It's a private mini-directory just for that group — a club team, a committee, a neighborhood carpool.

• Invite by link or QR. Share a link (or show the QR code) and people tap to join. They can be at your school, another school in your community, or not on Roost at all.
• Guests welcome. Someone you invite who isn't on Roost can join as a guest — they just enter their name (and optionally a phone and school), no full account needed.
• You choose what you share. When you join, your name and school show to the other members; your email, phone, and kids are your choice (shared by default, you can turn any of them off).
• It can span schools. A shared circle can include families from different schools or communities — useful for a club team or any group that crosses school lines.
• The owner runs it — and can add co-owners. Whoever created the circle manages the members and the invite link, and can remove someone. They can also make another member a co-owner (look for the crown) so more than one person can help run it. You can leave a shared circle anytime.
• Owners can broadcast to the circle. The owner or any co-owner can use Broadcast to send one update by email to everyone in the circle — handy for a quick “practice is moved” or “forms are due.” Replies come back privately to whoever sent it; members can't reply to the whole group. (Regular members can still use “Email this circle” for a plain BCC'd email.)

The simplest way to think about it: Circles are private (you build them, only you see them). Clubs are public to your organization (anyone can find them and join). Same underlying mechanic — a list of people — but different scope.

• Anyone in your organization can create a Club. Name it, pick an emoji, add an optional description. Administrators can clean up junk if needed.
• Joining is one click. Browse the Clubs list, see what's there, click Join club. No approval needed in this first version — you join, you're in. (We may add an “approval required” option per club later, for groups that want vetting.)
• What other members can see. Right now, the Club's roster shows the names of everyone who joined — nothing more. No contact info, no addresses. Members are people you're organized with, not people whose information you can mine. If you want to reach a specific Club member, go look them up in the regular directory (where your sharing settings still control what they see).
• Broadcasts go to the whole Club. An administrator (or in v2, any Club member) can send a broadcast email to everyone in a Club. The sender doesn't see individual recipient emails — the same BCC-with-count-only model as organization-wide broadcasts.
• Blocking applies to Clubs too. If you block someone, they'll never see you in any Club, even one you both joined. They don't see your name in the roster, your contact info, or the fact that you're a member. Their member count is silently off by one. This is the same invariant as the rest of the directory — block hides you, full stop.
• Leaving a Club is your call. Click into the Club's detail page and hit Leave club. You'll stop getting that Club's broadcasts immediately. You can rejoin later if you change your mind — the Club doesn't remember you left.

Why we built this: at elementary, the school day revolves around the classroom — one teacher, one room. By middle and high school, that's not how families connect anymore — and at a foundation or HOA, classrooms were never the unit to begin with. Clubs give activity- or committee-based groups a real home inside Roost — one that doesn't depend on a classroom structure.

• It's one-way. Blocking is about what the blocked person sees, not what you see. You still see them normally (so you can keep track of events, committee work, classroom news, etc.).
• Shared kids stay visible. If you and the person you blocked share custody of a student, that student stays visible to them — co-parents legitimately need access to their kid's info. You're hidden from the student's family detail page on their end.
• Reasons stay private. If you note a reason when blocking, only you see it.
• Find blocked people in the Blocked circle. Your blocked list appears as a system circle below your regular circles. You can unblock from there or from the family detail page.
• Trusted Help listings respect blocks too. If you wrote a recommendation for a sitter, tutor, coach, or mentor, someone you've blocked won't see your name as the recommender — and a listing you authored about yourself is hidden from them entirely. The block carries through to the Trusted Help board, not just the rest of the directory.
• Administrators can still see everyone. District and organization administrators bypass blocks so they can manage the directory. Blocking is for member-to-member visibility, not for hiding from your organization's leadership.

• Teachers are always visible. No matter your sharing settings, the teacher names on your kid's class page show up. Teachers don't have private contact info in Roost — just names. (Only applies to school organizations.)
• Your own view always wins. No matter how you've set your sharing, you can always see your own member card, your own kids (if any), and your own contact info. The visibility rules are about what other members see, not what you see.

10. “I want to…” quick tasks

…change who can see me

Open your Profile (from the menu in the top-left of the directory). Pick your sharing default and scope. Save. Changes apply immediately.

…find another member's contact info

Search by name in the search bar at the top of the directory, or scroll the alphabetical list. If you don't find them, they may have chosen Private — try asking a mutual contact to add you to a circle you share.

…add a child Roost is missing

Open your Profile. Under Your children, choose Add a child Roost is missing and give their name and grade — they appear straight away. This is for a school where you already have a child: a new kindergartener alongside an older sibling, or a student the roster missed. For a child at a different school, that school has to approve you first, so use their request-access page.

…start a circle

On the Circles tab, click New circle, name it (and pick an emoji if you want), then add members from the member search.

…block someone

Open their member card, click Block next to their name (you can add a reason — only you see it). To unblock, open the system Blocked circle in your Circles list.

…fix my kid's grade or teacher

Open your Profile and find Your children. Pick the grade, then the teacher — the teacher list only shows teachers for the grade you picked. Leave the teacher blank if you don't know it yet. If the name itself is wrong, or your kid isn't listed at all, ask your administrator.

…become an admin or board member

Ask your organization's current admin to grant you a role from their Roles & permissions screen. The grant takes effect immediately and is visible in the role audit.

…stop receiving broadcast emails

Open any broadcast email and click the Unsubscribe from broadcasts link in the footer. Confirm the email it was sent to. You stay in the directory — this only silences future broadcasts from that organization. See Broadcast emails below for the fine print.

• You recommend them. Know a great sitter? Add a listing so other families at your school can find them. You show up as the person who vouched for them.
• They list themselves. A tutor or coach can post their own listing, which carries the names of any community members who've recommended them.

To add a listing: open the menu → Trusted Help → Add a listing. You choose what contact info to include.

Looking for help, not offering it

The other half of Trusted Help is the Looking for help tab, where families ask for what they need instead of waiting for the right listing to appear. Need a sitter for one Friday, or a math tutor for the term? Post it there.

• Everyone at your school sees it. Including families who've kept themselves out of the directory. A request is something you chose to publish, so it isn't limited to the people who can already look you up.
• Your name is shown; your contact details are not. When someone taps I can help, we email you and they go on the reply line. You write back if you want to. Nobody's phone number or address appears anywhere, and if you don't reply, you never had to turn anyone down out loud.
• It comes down on its own. A request with a date disappears just after that date; an open-ended one lasts a month. Found somebody sooner? Tap Found someone and it stops collecting replies.
• Blocking works both ways here. Unlike a listing you authored, a request is hidden in both directions: you won't see theirs and they won't see yours. Everything on this board leads to somebody contacting somebody, so a block closes it off entirely.

To ask for help: open the menu → Trusted Help → Ask.

Sharing across schools in your district

You can extend a listing beyond your own school to specific other schools in your district — handy when, say, your high-schooler babysits for families at the nearby elementary.

Requests travel the same way, and this is often the point of them. The families who can answer a sitter request are the ones with high schoolers, who are at a different school from the family that needs one. When you post on the Looking for help tab you can pick other schools in your district to post at too. Only schools that have turned this on appear, and if none have, the option isn't shown at all.

• Only listings about you or your own family. You can share your own listing, or one for your own kid. A recommendation you wrote about someone else stays at your school — third-party listings never fan out across the district. (Promoting an outside business district-wide is what Sponsors is for, and that's set up by your PTO.)
• You pick exactly which schools — for example just the one or two nearest neighborhoods — and only schools that have chosen to accept outside listings even appear as options. It's opt-in on both sides.
• It shows where it came from. At a receiving school, your listing carries a “Shared from [your school]” badge so families know the context.
• No district-wide people search. This shares a listing you chose to extend — it doesn't make you findable across schools. Nothing about you crosses a school line unless you put it there.

District admin

Manages all organizations in the district. Sees every member at every organization they manage. Sees email + phone for every member regardless of the member's sharing toggles (so they can reach out about real issues). Doesn't see private addresses unless the member has chosen to share them.

Organization admin

Manages a single organization. Same visibility rules as district admin but scoped to their organization. Usually the PTO president, foundation executive director, or whoever bought the Roost subscription. Organization admins can also update your data on your behalf — fixing a grade, swapping a teacher after a roster change, correcting a typo in a phone number you can't edit yourself. Grade and teacher you can also set yourself, from your Profile under Your children; email your admin for anything else that looks wrong.

Board member

Read-only elevated access: sees opted-in members even if they chose a narrower scope (so the board can email a grade, class, or cohort). No edit powers — they can't change other members' data. Replaces the old “everyone shares the admin password” pattern with proper individual accounts. At schools this is the PTO board; at foundations and HOAs it's the board.

Early tester

Same elevated visibility as a board member. Used while an organization is in the pre-launch period and a handful of trusted members are validating the roster before the rest of the organization is invited in.

Teacher

Imported from a school's roster, not granted manually. Teachers appear on class and grade pages so families can put names and faces together. Teachers don't have logins by default — they're shown for context, not for communication through Roost. Only applies to school organizations.

Every role change is logged. Administrators can see who granted whom which role and when, on the Roles & permissions page. This is the accountability trail that replaces a shared password.

End-of-year rollover

At year-end, the rollover advances every student a grade, graduates the top grade out, and clears homerooms so no one shows in last year's class (you set new teachers on your next roster import). Nothing changes until you review and confirm, and an applied rollover can be undone — most recent first.

If you edit a student after a rollover: undo is careful about it. If you change that kid's grade (or mark them inactive), undo leaves them exactly as you set them and reports a conflict rather than overwriting your edit. Any other change — an address, a name, a note — is always kept; the rollover and its undo only ever touch grade, school year, and homeroom.

• Why this is decoupled. An organization's leadership has to be able to reach every member for time-sensitive things — schedule changes, snow days, urgent volunteer asks. If turning “Private” muted those, leadership would lose half their audience overnight. So directory privacy and broadcast reach are two different switches.
• Senders never see your email address. Broadcasts are sent with everyone in BCC. The admin who composed the message sees a count (“reached 263 members”) and aggregate delivery stats, never an individual recipient list. Other members who received the same broadcast also don't see your address. Your email stays as private inside the broadcast machinery as it is in the directory listing.
• Replies go to one inbox. When you reply to a broadcast, it goes to the single reply-to address your organization chose — usually something like president@yourorg.org. Other recipients don't see your reply.
• Unsubscribing is one click. Every broadcast has an unsubscribe link in the footer. Click it, confirm the email address it was sent to, and you're off the broadcast list for that organization. You stay in the directory — only the broadcasts stop.
• Going Private is a separate decision. If you want to be off the broadcast list and hidden from the directory, do both: change your sharing to Private (from your Profile) and click the unsubscribe link in any broadcast. They're independent.
• Volume caps. Each organization has a monthly cap on broadcast sends — your administrators can't accidentally blast you 50 times in a week. Caps are visible to administrators on the messaging settings page.
• Schedule a broadcast for later. When composing, an admin can choose “Or schedule it for later” on the confirm step and pick a date and time (in their own time zone) instead of sending right away — handy for drafting a back-to-school note in the evening and having it go out the next morning. Scheduled broadcasts wait under a Scheduled section in the broadcast list, where the sender can edit or cancel them before they go. Roost checks for due sends every few minutes, so it goes out at — or just after — the chosen time.
• Welcome the families heading your way (feeder schools). A school can broadcast to a single grade at one of its feeder schools — for example, a high school PTO messaging the middle school's current 8th-grade families before they move up. It only works when both sides opt in: the feeder (lower) school's admin turns it on under Organization → Cross-school sharing, and the sender picks the feeder school and grade. The email tells each family why they're getting it (“your child is in grade 8 at [school], and [school] is their next school”). To be clear: this is a grade-targeted broadcast within a configured feeder relationship — it does not let anyone search or see other schools' families.
• Customize the sender for one broadcast. On the compose screen, “Customize sender & replies” lets the sender give a single broadcast its own From name and reply-to address (e.g. so a room parent or committee gets the replies) without changing the school's defaults. Leave it blank to use the school defaults.

Building a newsletter

A short note is fine as plain text. For the longer monthly one, choose “Build a newsletter” on the compose screen.

• Volunteers needed — the live job list. Point this at a club or an event and the email lists its jobs with the real count beside each one: Ticket redemption, 17 of 20 spots open. Roost reads the sign-up sheet when the email is built, so nobody has to remember to update a number. You can cap how many jobs are listed and hide the ones already full — and when some are hidden the email says “sign up or see all 11 jobs” rather than quietly showing a shorter list. Fill a shift after you write the newsletter and before it sends, and the email that arrives already knows.
• Event — pulled from the real event. Pick an event already in Roost and the block fills in its name, date, time and location, with a link through to the event page. Change the start time in Roost and you do not have to remember you also wrote it into a newsletter.
• Contact card — filled in for you. Your organization's address, phone, website and social links, taken from Organization. You type nothing, and it cannot go stale.
• Start from a shape, not a blank page. Pick Monthly newsletter, Call for volunteers, Event announcement, Short update, or Blank. These fill in the structure and leave the writing to you — deliberately, so nobody ever mails out “Title goes here.”
• The rest of the pieces. A header band, a big opening, section headings, text, a picture beside text, a picture on its own, a highlighted callout, a button, and a divider. Add, reorder, and delete them in any combination.
• See it as families will, while you write. The panel beside you is not an approximation — it is rendered by the same code that builds the real email.
• It uses your colors. Bands pick up the accent color from Organization → Brand, and you can recolor them from the preview. Roost chooses the text color for each band by measuring contrast, so a header can't end up unreadable no matter which color you pick.
• Pictures. Drop in a photo or a design exported from anywhere — Canva included. Large phone photos are shrunk in your browser before uploading, so it takes a couple of seconds rather than thirty. Alt text is required — a sentence describing the picture, for families using a screen reader and for the many mail apps that don't load images by default.
• Links can be typed the way people say them. www.example.com is fine; Roost fills in the rest.
• Save a draft at any point. Half-finished blocks and all. Close the tab, come back tomorrow, and everything is where you left it, including the audience you had chosen. Your work is also kept in the browser as you go, so a dropped connection doesn't cost you the evening.
• Show it to someone before it goes out. Share for review creates a link you can send to your president or principal. They don't need a Roost account. They see the email exactly as families will and nothing else — not the audience, not the recipient count, and no way to send it. The link expires after 14 days and you can switch it off at any time.
• Save your own layout as a template. Once you have the monthly one looking right, save it under a name and start from it every month. Templates belong to your organization, so anyone who can send can use them. A template remembers the layout and your colors — never a subject line and never an audience, because those two should be a fresh decision every single time.
• Send yourself a test first. Always worth it. Phones, Gmail and Outlook each render email slightly differently, and a test costs nothing.
• What you learn afterwards, and what you don't. You'll see how many people a newsletter reached and a total count of link clicks — useful for knowing whether the sign-up link is working. Roost does not tell you which family clicked, or who opened it. That's deliberate. Whether a specific parent read your newsletter is not something your PTO needs to know.

• The tab appears only when there are sponsors. If your organization hasn't added any yet, the tab stays hidden — no empty pages, no confusion. As soon as the first sponsor is added, the tab shows up.
• Tap-to-call, tap-to-route, tap-to-visit. Each sponsor card has phone, address, and website fields where the admin filled them in. Tapping the phone opens your dialer. Tapping the address opens Maps with directions. Tapping the website opens your browser. No copy-paste.
• Browse by category. If there are enough sponsors to need filtering, you'll see pills at the top — Restaurants, Healthcare, Tutoring, etc. Tap one to see only that category. Tap “All” to see everything.
• Offers and promotions. If a sponsor included a promo (“Show this screen for 10% off,” “Family Night Friday — 10% to PTO”), it appears highlighted on the card. The sponsor sets these themselves and your organization curates them.
• Roost doesn't vet sponsors. The relationship is between your organization and the business. Treat each one like an introduction from your school community — meet, ask questions, and trust your judgment. Same approach as Trusted Help.
• Your information stays private. Sponsors are not Roost users. They have no access to member information. When you tap to call or get directions, your phone or browser does that locally — nothing routes through Roost.

Open it from the directory hamburger → Admin home → Organization tab. Every change is audit-logged (who, what, and the optional reason you typed) so the trail is intact when the next admin takes over.

Identity

• Name — the public name of your organization. Shown in the directory header, in broadcast email FROM lines, and on every member's home screen.
• Short name — the squished version used in tight spaces (organization switcher dropdown, mobile chrome). For example, if your full name is “Maple Grove Elementary School,” the short name might be just “Maple Grove.”
• District — pick from the list. Drives the district-admin visibility scope; a district admin can manage every organization whose district matches their own. Pick Private if you're a stand-alone organization without a district umbrella.
• Type — elementary, middle, high, K-8, K-12, preschool, or foundation. This drives what filters (Classes vs. Grades vs. Cohorts), the grade options offered when adding a family, and whether Trusted Help is shown at all (foundations don't have a Trusted Help destination).

Address & phone

Optional. Used in the printed-directory header at the top of the page, and as the shipping address if you order a printed directory through Roost. Leave blank if you don't use a printed directory.

Logo

Square mark shown in the directory header and at the top of every broadcast email. PNG or JPG, ideally a square crop — non-square images get letterboxed onto a card background. Around 200×200 pixels is plenty; bigger files are auto-compressed on upload.

Default visibility for new members

This is the most consequential setting on the page. It decides what shows up the first time a new member signs in — before they pick anything themselves. Whatever you pick here applies only to members who haven't already chosen their own setting; existing members are never touched by a change here.

The three options, in the same words members see on their own Profile page:

Visible to other members

New members start visible — their name shows in browse, search, class lists, and grade lists (where they apply). They still control which contact fields (email, phone, address) get shared, but the member card itself is on by default. This matches what existing members in section #1 of this page call “Visible.”

When to pick this: opt-out cultures — organizations whose paper directory traditionally went to every member by default, and where people expect to see and be seen.

Example A — start of year, admin imports the roster. The admin uploads a roster CSV under Roster. Every member on the roster is auto-listed in the directory at Visible. If a member wants out, they sign in, open Profile, and switch their setting to Private or Opt out. Until they do, they show up to the rest of the community.

Example B — new member joins mid-year. Someone joins the organization. An admin sends them an invite (or they submit the public signup form and the admin approves it). Once they sign in for the first time, they're Visible by default. If they want a different setting, they pick it on the spot.

Private

New members can search and browse the directory themselves, but no one else can find them. They don't appear in browse, in search, or on class/grade lists. One-way visibility — they can reach out; nobody reaches in. This is the same “Private” option members can pick from their own Profile.

When to pick this: cultures where most members want to look up others but feel uncomfortable being looked up themselves until they actively opt in. Common when an organization is rolling out Roost for the first time and wants members to make a conscious visibility choice rather than land on a directory listing automatically.

Example. An organization enables Roost for the first time and sets the default to Private. New members sign in, see others they can look up, and choose for themselves whether to flip to Visible. Over the next few weeks the visible roster grows as people opt in — instead of the whole organization showing up the day Roost goes live.

Opt out

New members start with no directory presence at all — they can't see other members, and other members can't see them. They're effectively outside the directory until they sign in and change the setting. This is the strictest default; rare in practice as an org-wide choice.

When to pick this: only if your organization has a hard policy that no directory presence may exist without explicit per-member opt-in (some independent schools or international schools fit this). For most organizations, Private is the better “strict default” — it still lets members see the community they joined.

Changing the default later is safe. Existing members keep whatever they picked. Only members who sign in after you save will land on the new default. So if you start at Visible and switch to Private three months in, members who already opted in stay opted in — only new arrivals get the stricter default.