Sub-organizations & structure

Sub-organizations let you split one Lurno account into a tree of related organizations that keep their own people, programs and settings while still rolling up to you. Use them when parts of your organization need to operate independently.

What this does

A sub-organization is a full child organization nested under another one. Each has its own people, programs, roles, branding and domains, but inherits branding from its parent unless it overrides it. Sub-organizations can have their own sub-organizations.

This maps naturally to how organizations divide themselves: departments or regions in a company, campuses or faculties at a university, schools or grade bands in a district, or separate reseller and customer accounts for a SaaS academy.

When to use sub-orgs

Reach for sub-organizations when you need separation that a single organization can’t give you:

Separate directories. Each sub-organization has its own people list, so one branch’s audience never mixes with another’s.
Delegated administration. Whoever creates a sub-organization is made its administrator manager there — they can appoint and replace who runs it without gaining standing day-to-day power over its learners and instructors.
Distinct branding and domains. A sub-organization can carry its own logo, theme and custom hostname while defaulting to its parent’s.
Shared capacity, controlled. Plan caps are pooled across the whole tree, and you can hand a sub-organization its own member allocation out of that pool.

If you only need to segment people within one organization, use Groups instead — they’re lighter and don’t create a separate directory.

About structure levels

Some tenants have a structure: a named set of tiers (L1, L2, L3 …) that describes what each layer of the tree represents — say Region, Campus, Department. Structures and their levels are defined by Lurno for your tenant; there is no self-serve screen for creating them.

You do not need a structure to create sub-organizations. If your organization doesn’t use levels, the dialog says so and the new organization is created directly beneath the current one, inheriting its customer type.

Create a sub-organization

Open My Organizations from the Settings section of the sidebar.
Find the organization the new one should sit under. Each top-level organization card carries an Add child control, and each nested row carries the same control labelled Add.
Select it. The Add child organization dialog opens.
If your tenant offers more than one candidate level, pick one from the Structure level tiles (shown as L1, L2 … with the level’s name). If there’s exactly one it’s displayed and applied for you, and if there are none the dialog tells you so.
Enter the Organization name.
Select Create. The new organization appears in the tree, ready for people and programs.

Newly created sub-organizations inherit their parent’s branding. To give one its own look, switch to it in the organization switcher and edit its branding — see Branding & theming.

Manage a sub-organization

My Organizations carries a few inline controls, and which ones appear depends on where in the tree you are:

Member allocations — divide the tree’s member pool across direct children, so one branch can’t consume the whole plan. Leave a field empty to let a sub-organization draw from the shared pool uncapped. Available on any organization that has children, including top-level ones.
Modules — an icon on a nested row that has children of its own. It opens a Module Access panel of on/off switches, saved with Save Modules.
Collections — same placement as Modules: grant a sub-organization access to content held elsewhere in the tree.
Programs — the shared-programs control. This one also appears on leaf sub-organizations, since a leaf is the usual share target.

Select an organization’s name to open its detail view, which has a People tab and — for administrators — a Language Settings tab. See Terminology.

Reference

Aspect	How it behaves
Branding & theme	Inherited from the nearest ancestor that set it; overridable per organization
People	Separate directory per organization
Programs	Managed per organization; can be explicitly shared down or across the tree
Domains	Each organization keeps its own hostname list
Plan caps	Shared across the whole tree and resolved from the tree’s root; the organization cap counts descendants only, so the root organization itself doesn’t consume a slot
Member allocations	An optional member sub-cap drawn from the tree total, set per sub-organization
Nesting	Sub-organizations can have their own sub-organizations
Structure levels	Optional descriptive tiers, defined by Lurno for your tenant

Troubleshooting

“Plan limit reached — your plan’s limit has been reached.” The tree has hit its organization cap. The cap counts descendants across the whole tree from its root, so a sibling branch’s sub-organizations count too. Raising it means changing the package, which Lurno does for you.

“This organization has no active subscription.” No plan resolves anywhere up the tree, so every gated create is blocked. This needs Lurno or whoever manages your subscription to assign a package.

“This sub-organization’s allocation has been reached.” An allocation drawn from the tree pool is full. In practice you’ll meet this when adding people, not organizations — adjust it from the parent’s Member allocations control.

The Add child control isn’t there. It only appears for organization administrators. It isn’t scoped branch by branch, so if you do see it everywhere, the check that matters is the one the server runs when you press Create — creating under a parent you don’t administer is refused there.

The dialog says my organization doesn’t use structure levels. That’s fine — creation still works and the new organization is created directly beneath the current one. Structure levels are defined by Lurno; there’s nothing for you to enable.

A sub-org shows the wrong logo. It’s inheriting from its parent. Because logos inherit as a pair, uploading either one on the sub-organization takes over both slots — see Branding & theming.