Folio for Institutions gives your school its own branded research and learning platform on its own subdomain — yourschool.folio.education — where every submission carries verifiable proof of authorship instead of an AI-detector's guess. This is the administrator's guide to standing one up.
Getting your institution
There are two ways in, depending on your size:
- Standalone and extracurricular programs — tutoring centres, academies, bootcamps, olympiad programs — can sign up directly at get started: pick your address, choose a plan, and go live.
- Schools, districts, and universities get a per-institution quote. Start a conversation from the pricing page — Contact sales or Request a demo — and we'll scope the rollout with you.
Either way, the whole platform is included. There are no feature tiers to unlock; you narrow features down, you don't pay to turn them on.
Your subdomain and branding
Your institution lives at its own subdomain, in your colours, with your logo, favicon, login page, and footer. Students sign in to your institution, not to a product they've never heard of. You can set an announcement banner and custom footer links, and choose whether a small "Powered by Folio" line appears. Most of this is a single afternoon of setup, not a migration project.
Enrolment: who gets in
You choose how people join, per institution:
- Roster — only people you've added can enter. The right choice for a controlled cohort.
- Email domain — anyone with an institution email address (
@yourschool.edu) can join automatically. The right choice for opening a whole campus at once.
Everyone who isn't a member hits a membership wall, so your subdomain never quietly exposes anything to outsiders.
Feature control, down to the person
Every tool can be turned on or off by role — students, staff — or for one individual. Features are on by default; you narrow them. Want Research Radar for staff but not students, or Surveyor for one department head? That's a couple of clicks in the feature matrix, and the change is enforced on the server, not just hidden in the nav.
The admin console
Everything an administrator touches lives in one console: departments, programs, terms, courses, sections, and staff. You can see who has access and why, fix it in place, and keep the registrar's record authority separate from the keys to your branding — separation of duties by design. Every change is written to an audit trail, which is exactly what your procurement process will ask about.
Inviting staff
Add staff and assign each a role — admin, registrar, or a recorded title like department head or coordinator. Only admins carry management power; the other roles are scoped, read-only titles for your org directory. Give people the least they need to do their job.
A note on data
Each institution is isolated from every other, protected by row-level security, on a GDPR-aligned footing. We don't mine your institution's work, and nothing a student writes personally is exposed to the institution, or vice versa — one identity, two contexts. See your data and privacy for the details.
Related: Institutional access for members · Folio Classroom for instructors