Whether you're launching your first workshop or scaling collaboration across your entire team, taking a few minutes to set up your workspace(s) will save time, increase consistency, and ensure everyone starts off on the right foot.
This guide walks you through the key setup steps—from branding your workspace to enabling powerful features like AI assistance and shared templates. By the end, you’ll have a fully customised environment designed to support smooth, efficient collaboration across your team.
1. Add a Team Logo & Profile Logo
Add a logo which will appear on the top right of all session exports, and on the library resources that your team creates.
Head to your Workspace settings page, and click on 'Team settings' (Admins/Owners only)
Upload your company logo — this replaces the default SessionLab logo which appears on the top right of your exported sessions
To brand the team library resources, upload your round profile logo in the same area; this will appear next to methods added to the library
2. Define Default Planner Layout
You can customise the column layout directly within the Session Planner, but these changes apply only to that specific session.
To set default column preferences for all future sessions, scroll down to the 'Block columns' section on your Workspace Settings page. Here you can:
Rename columns (you can add in non-English titles, if you work in other languages)
Reorder your columns
Adjust which columns are shown in the planner by default
These settings affect all new sessions created from this Workspace, ensuring uniform layout and clarity.
3. Set Up Custom Block Category Color Coding
Color-coded categories give you a clear overview of the style and interaction mix in your session.
You can adjust them within a session to customise the categories for that session only, or set default names and category colors in your account settings. These defaults will be applied to all new sessions—giving your team a consistent visual structure.
Still under Team Settings, scroll to the Categories section
Set custom names of any category
Customise the color for any category using the color picker. You can select from your organisation's approved color palette for consistency.
4. Opt‑In to AI Usage
If you are looking for inspiration when designing your session, you can work with the AI-Assistant to help:
Import existing agendas (e.g. from PDF, Word, PowerPoint)
Create a session from scratch, following prompts you enter into the chat and the context you set for your workspace
Refine or update your session content, suggesting activities to complete your agenda's objectives
Adjust the language, tone, add breaks or energizers, or shorten / lengthen the overall session.
In order to AI-supported features in SessionLab, you'll be asked to opt in to the usage of AI features. Mind that your data is _not_ used for training any AI/ML models, according to our AI Usage Policy.
5. Create Your First Session Template for the Team
You can create a session from your homepage by clicking on the ‘Create session’ button in the top-right of your workspace.
When you click on this button, a pop-up will appear asking whether you’d like to create a new session from scratch, or use / modify one of the pre-existing workshop templates in our library, so you can choose to customise one of our pre-designed session plans.
Once you've finished designing a session, you can turn a session into a Template. Templates are a source session which needs to be copied before being modified, meaning you’ll be able to work on a customised full session design instead of a blank canvas
Create a Template from any session by clicking on the Export button, selecting 'Create template' and then choosing which workspace you would like to save the template in.
6. Create the First Method in Your Team Library
Sessions are made up of blocks, and every block represents an item in your agenda. These might include exercises, games, activities, group discussions, breaks or more. You’ll create a block for every step of your agenda, add instructions, materials, any necessary links and even add attachments so that everything you need for running your session is in the right place.
Every block you create in SessionLab becomes a reusable element that you can look-up and reuse in future sessions, saving time, and streamlining the design process. No more re-typing or manually cutting and pasting across Word documents or Excel sheets!
Create a method directly in your team library by navigating to the Library, choosing your workspace from the top menu, and clicking on 'Add new resource'. Here you can fill in your method's details and choose which workspace to save this resource in.
Alternatively, you can add a method to your team's library directly from the session planner. Click on the dotted menu next to any block and choose 'Add to library'.
With either of these processes, the content will be added to your private library area, only visible to yourself and the other members of your workspace.
7. Begin Collaborating with your colleagues, and sharing your agenda in different formats
SessionLab was built to support collaboration between your colleagues, clients and stakeholders. There are a number of ways to share your session, depending on the level of content you'd like the audience to see.
Watch this short collaboration overview video to understand the different sharing options.