The person who requested the subscription should have received an email with an activation link. The subscription must be activated by a person who will administer it, so you'll need that email to get started.

The Activate your organization page appears.

You can activate your subscription two ways. If you've already created an ArcGIS public account and want to use the account and any content associated with it, you can use the public account to activate your organizational subscription. If you don't already have an account, or want to create a new one, for example, if the public account has personal projects and this organization is for business purposes, you can create a new account to activate the organization.

This tutorial will show the Create a new ArcGIS organization option, but many of the setup steps will be the same across both options.

• Organization name: This is the long, descriptive name for the organization, such as your company or nonprofit's full name.
• Organization short name: This is what will form the organization's URL. Consider using an acronym or nickname to keep the URL short and easy to type.

You can also choose a specific region to determine the default basemap gallery and the default basemap and extent for new maps. The default extent shows the entire world.

Now you'll set up the default administrator account that will be used to activate the organization.

• First name
• Last name
• Email

These details can all be updated later from the My Profile page if needed.

Your account is created and the subscription is activated.

• Username
• Password
• Security question

Once created, your username cannot be changed. It also has to be unique within the ArcGIS Online system.

A welcome window appears with a few suggestions to get started with your organization, including adding more members and customizing pages.

First, you'll add your company's logo The logo appears on the home and organization pages.

Next, you'll customize your home page.

The home page editor appears. The home page editor includes a flexible set of components and options that allow you to create a unique entry point to your site. As you configure your page using the home page editor, a live preview of your design choices helps you achieve the look and functionality you want. Use the view options at the bottom of the home page editor to see how your page will appear on different devices.

First, you'll add a header.

In this pane, you can choose the background and font color for your home page. Before making any of these choices, you'll want to upload your logo to the home page.

Now that you have your logo for an idea of the color scheme you need to match, you'll look at the background. You can upload a custom background matching your company's brand guidelines or choose from several stock covers. For the purposes of this tutorial, you'll upload a custom cover.

The image is added to the home page. Against this background, the white title text stands out well. Finally, you'll look at positioning for the title and background image.

The cover image resizes to the upper half of the home page layout. This will allow you to add blocks below the background image, such as a description about your organization and map gallery.

Now you'll add a description about the organization's purpose.

The Add block pane appears. There are three options: a Text block, an Item gallery, or a Link. You can add text blocks at any time, but you'll need to create maps before adding the gallery block to your home page.

Each text block is configured with a headline and body copy. Since this block will sit underneath the title of the organization, you won't use the headline in this example.

You can also change the alignment of the text and color of the background here, depending on what works with your background image.

The home page includes your logo and organization name, which overlay a banner image. The organization description appears in a box below the banner.

The Create a group window appears.

You'll add a thumbnail image for the group to make it stand out to organization members. To save time, you'll use the same image that you used for your organization logo.

Next, you'll add a summary and tags for the group so that it's easy to find and identify.

Anyone can search for and find your group, but they won't be able to apply to join the group. You do want colleagues to be able to help you curate content for this group later, so you want to allow others to contribute content.

The group is saved with the settings that you specified.

The list of results includes all the public items that are part of ArcGIS Living Atlas. You want to feature only web maps and layers on your home page. First, you'll filter the results to show only web maps.

The list of search results refreshes to show only items that are layers.

The selection count at the top of the Add items to group pane should say 3 items selected.

• Invasive Plants in the United States
• Intact Habitat Cores
• USA Current Wildfires

The layers that you shared with the group are now listed on the Content tab for your Home Page Featured Content group.

Since you only have one group in the organization, your Home Page Featured Content group is automatically added to the home page above the description text block. Once you've created more groups, you can change this in the Body pane under Group.

You can also choose what information about each map and app is displayed. By default, the cards show a short summary about each item, but these are long and push the organization description out of sight. To change this display, you'll remove the extra information.

Finally, you'll reorder the content blocks so that the description of your organization appears above the featured content group.

The New item window appears.

If the field types can be identified, they are set automatically. You can remove fields, change the display name of the field, and change the field type.

The Location type field indicates the type of location-based data that you're providing, such as street addresses or latitude-longitude coordinates. In this case, the CSV file includes both United States address data and latitude-longitude coordinates. Latitude and Longitude were chosen because they don't cost credits to map. Adding an item from a file of addresses using the Addresses or Places option will use the ArcGIS Online World Geocoding Service to find corresponding locations. By default, ArcGIS Online geocodes addresses based on your organization's region. Using this service will also consume credits.

You'll publish this file as a hosted feature layer. Publishing the first hosted layer in your organization will also enable the credit tools so you can see how the credit reports work later.

The data file and the new hosted feature layer are added to My Content. The item page appears for the hosted feature layer. You can add a summary, description, and other information by clicking Edit in each editable section. To learn best practices for sharing content and creating compelling and authoritative item details, see Best practices for sharing. For now, you'll share the item with your organization.

By default, the hosted feature layer can only be accessed by the person who published it or by an administrator. Your colleagues will need to use this layer, so you'll share the hosted feature layer with your organization.

The Share window has options to share the item with everyone, your organization, or your group.