The advent calendar gives your colleagues a small surprise every day in December, inside the Flip App. Behind each door there's a story, a quiz, a recipe, a poll, a raffle or another little thing you prepare. This article explains how to set one up, from the first click to publishing.

Before you start

• Who can set it up: your organisation's Flip admins, for every calendar. A Flip admin can also let the owners of a user group edit a calendar, see Who can edit. Where Flip allows it, owners of a user group also create calendars for their groups. There's no separate account or role to request.
• What you need: about an hour for the settings, and the content for your doors. Most teams collect stories, photos, quiz questions and recipes from colleagues in October and fill the doors in November.
• What your colleagues need: nothing. They open the calendar from the Flip App and are signed in with their Flip account automatically.
• What Flip does for you: Flip connects the calendar to your organisation. Ask your Flip contact if you can't open it yet.

Tip: Nobody sees anything until you publish. Feel free to try things out.

Open the admin

Open the admin at: https://advent-calendar.cse.getflip.gg/app/admin

In the calendar, admins see a Manage calendar button at the top. It opens the admin. If the calendar is embedded in another page, the admin opens in a new window, because it never runs inside another page. On phones and tablets the button is hidden: open the admin on a computer. You can also open it directly at https://advent-calendar.cse.getflip.gg/app/admin and bookmark it. If the browser doesn't know you yet (a new browser, cleared cookies or a month away), the admin first shows Advent Calendar Admin with one field, Flip URL or keyword: the URL you open Flip at, for example acme.flip-app.com, or your organisation's keyword, for example acme. You can paste the URL straight from your browser's address bar. Then it signs you in as usual, and the browser remembers your organisation from then on.

The admin's menu on the left has three entries at the bottom:

• Back to Flip takes you back to the Flip app, where you open the calendar from its tile.
• Help articles opens these articles. Wherever you see the ? icon in the admin, it takes you to the matching part of an article.
• Dark mode or Light mode switches the admin's look.

The name of your organisation is shown under these entries, so you always know which organisation you're working in.

Create your calendar

The Calendars page lists your organisation's calendars. The first time, it's empty. Flip admins see Create calendar, and so do user group owners if Flip set them to also create calendars.

Click Create calendar. The calendar is created right away as a draft, and it already has:

• 24 doors, starting on 1 December, one door per day. They're still empty: in the setup guide's first step you choose whether to fill them with the ready-made calendar or start empty. See Ready-made or empty.
• Your language as the calendar's language, if it's one of the 22 the calendar supports. Otherwise German. See Languages.
• Your organisation's colours and logo, imported from Flip.
• Points and a leaderboard, switched on. See Points.

Ready-made or empty

The setup guide's first step, Languages and content, decides what the calendar starts with:

1. Pick the languages your colleagues read. In the Add language list, languages the ready-made calendar is written in have a star and say Ready-made calendar available. Today, that's German and English. The star stays on the language once you've added it.
2. Click Use the ready-made calendar or Start empty.

• Use the ready-made calendar fills the calendar in those of your languages it's written in: stories, quizzes, recipes, links, polls, shared goals and raffles behind the 24 doors, many of them with a picture, plus a cover picture and a welcome text. Replace the examples with your own. See Editing doors.
• Start empty leaves the doors empty. You write the welcome text yourself.

Until you choose, this is the only step you can open: the other steps, the other tabs and Preview are greyed out and open once you've chosen, since what they show depends on it.

Either way, the step then disappears from the guide. A language you add later starts empty, also with the ready-made calendar: write its texts yourself. While the calendar is a draft, you can still start over from the ready-made calendar in Settings. See Settings.

There's no limit to how many calendars you create, and several can be published at the same time, each with its own link. If Flip has switched that off for your organisation, only one can be published at a time. See Several calendars at once. You can delete a draft at any time from the ⋮ menu next to Publish (Delete draft).

Owners of a user group see every calendar in the list, with its name and phase, but open only the calendars of the user groups they own. The others are listed as plain text, tagged View only, with the hint You edit the calendars of the Flip user groups you own. The others are listed for an overview. Where Flip lets owners create calendars, Create calendar first asks which of their groups the calendar is for; with one group, it's chosen for them.

The setup guide

A draft calendar opens on its Overview tab, which is a setup guide with seven steps. Each step opens in place, so you can do the whole setup from this one page. A preview on the right shows what your colleagues will see first.

After the first step, you don't have to follow the order, and the guide never blocks you: you can publish once nothing is missing, even if an optional step is open. The tabs at the top (Settings, Appearance, Points, Doors) hold the same settings and more, in the guide's order.

The fifth step shows all doors in a month view. Each door is marked Done, Not done, Issue (something is missing) or Translation missing. Click a door to edit it, or use Review door … to go to the next door that isn't done.

How your colleagues find the calendar

Your colleagues open the calendar from a tile in the Flip App. A Flip admin in your organisation adds the tile in Flip, with the calendar's link as its URL. Each calendar has its own link: you find it on the calendar's Overview tab, in the Calendar link card, with a Copy link button, once the calendar is published. A draft doesn't show it yet. Right after publishing, the window Your calendar is published! shows the link too, to set as the URL of its tile in Flip (see Publishing). Both offer Download icon: an icon for the tile, if you'd like one.

They're signed in with their Flip account, without a login screen, and the calendar shows in their Flip language if you've added it.

• Before the date you choose in Shown in the app from, they see a short "on its way" message.
• From then until the first door, they see the calendar with every door locked and a countdown.
• From the first door on, a new door opens every day at midnight.

See What participants see for the whole experience.

Tip: Announce the calendar in a Flip post or newsletter a few days before the first door, and say where to find its tile.

A typical timeline

Where to go next

• Name, schedule and time zone
• Languages and translations
• Appearance
• Editing doors and Door types
• Publishing and the calendar's phases
• Troubleshooting and FAQ