Motley
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HelpGetting Started

Getting started

Motley turns the sprawl of NYC’s 262 neighborhoods and thousands of schools into clear answers for yourfamily. The more we know about who you are and what you’re weighing, the sharper those answers get. Here’s how to set up in a few minutes.

1. Create your account

Sign in with Google. That’s the only way in — there are no passwords to remember or reset. Signing in keeps your family profile, saved schools, and neighborhood research in sync across every device you use. You can browse most of Motley without an account, but signing in is what lets us personalize and save your work.

2. Tell us about your family

The easiest way is to just talk it through: open your dashboardand tell Intelligence “help me set up our family profile.” It asks a question or two at a time, rounds out the optional details, and then proposes the whole profile in one go — you review it and confirm. Same result as the form, fewer forms. See Motley Intelligence.

Prefer a form? The onboarding wizard covers the same ground in eight short steps: about you, your situation, your partner, your children and their grades, housing and budget, your neighborhood priorities, your school priorities, and a wrap-up. Each step saves as you go, so you can stop and pick it back up later.

One step isn’t skippable: your home address, on the Housing & Budget step. It anchors everything we calculate for you — your district, your zoned school, commute times, and how far anything is from where you actually live. If you’re moving, use the address you’re starting from; you can change it any time.

3. Rank your priorities

This is the step that makes Motley yours. Instead of forcing you into a preset, we let you rank the things families weigh — academics, class size, diversity, programs, how close a school is, parent satisfaction, and special-education support — plus how much commute, safety, and cost matter to your neighborhood picture. Every ranking you see afterwards is re-sorted against your order.

4. Fine-tune it later

Everything is editable under Settings — add or edit children, update your home address, change your school preferences, adjust your priorities, or turn notifications on and off. See Family profiles & children for how children and saved profiles differ.

What to do next