What is PurposeTech?
An overview of PurposeTech – volunteer and crew management for any purpose event, from a single clean-up to an organiser running many events.
Volunteer and crew management for purpose events
PurposeTech is volunteer and crew management for any purpose event: street appeals, runs and challenges, tours and open days, festivals and clean-ups. It suits a single event and an organiser running many. Volunteers choose a site and a shift on a branded sign-up site, coordinators run their own patch, and your team sees how well every site and shift is covered.
It replaces the spreadsheets, shared drives and email chains that most organisers outgrow.
Welcome back, Sam
Managing Greenfield Foundation NZ
Your Campaigns
Annual Street Appeal 2026
ActiveSpring Gala 2026
UpcomingAnnual Street Appeal 2025
EndedOrganisation Management
View and manage volunteers across all campaigns
Manage custom domains and subdomains
Manage admin access and permissions
PurposeTech works beside your ticketing and fundraising platforms. It does not sell tickets, take payments or run peer-to-peer fundraising. Many events are a single one-off event: one collection day, clean-up or festival rather than an ongoing programme.
How it's structured
PurposeTech is organised in layers, so one organisation can run several brands and many campaigns from the same admin portal.
Organisation and tenant
The organisation is your account. A tenant sits inside it and holds the defaults for a programme or brand: name, logo, colours, header and footer, and the registration form. A campaign uses its tenant's defaults unless you turn on that campaign's own style override.
Campaign
A specific event, appeal or programme. Each campaign has its own name, dates, time zone, public sign-up site (on a PurposeTech subdomain or your own domain), email templates and volunteers. New campaigns are password protected until you switch that off, so you can build in private.
Region, area, site and shift
Inside a campaign, work is arranged in a location tree:
| Level | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Region | The top grouping | Auckland |
| Area | A group of sites. This is what an area coordinator looks after | Takapuna |
| Site | A place volunteers attend (stored as a "job") | Hurstmere Road, Takapuna |
| Shift | A time slot at a site that a volunteer books | 8:00am – 12:00pm |
Areas and sites also carry an optional sub-region label for finer grouping.
Region, Area, Site and Shift are the default words. A Terminology setting, on the tenant and again per campaign, renames them across the portal and the public site, for example "Venue" instead of "Site".
A campaign can also hold events on the Calendar page: internal planning entries (month, planner and board views, colour coding, assigned team members, spreadsheet import) that help your team plan a season. They are not pages on the public site.
Roles
| Role | What they can do |
|---|---|
| Owner | Everything in the admin portal, including settings, design, domains, Salesforce sync and team member roles |
| Volunteer Admin | Day-to-day admin: volunteers, sites, shifts, reports, email templates and history. Can send a team invite, but cannot choose a role or remove a member |
| Area Coordinator | Runs the roster for the sites in their assigned areas |
| Site Coordinator | Runs the roster for one site |
| Site Contact | A contact person recorded against a site |
| Volunteer | Signs up and manages their own shifts |
See User Management for how to assign coordinators and invite team members. Admins sign in with an emailed magic link or a passkey. There are no passwords.
What it does
Self-service volunteer sign-up
A branded site where volunteers find a site, pick one or more shifts, enter their details and confirm from an emailed link. Volunteers can invite a friend onto the same shifts, and can sign in later to see or change their shifts and details. Admins can also add volunteers by hand or import them from a CSV file.
Distributed coordination
Area and site coordinators open a roster on the campaign website, limited to their own areas or site. They can add volunteers, move them between shifts, remove them and download the roster. Admins can switch to an At a glance view of every site.
Waitlists
When a shift, site or area fills, you can offer a waitlist. Admins work the list from the Waitlist page: phone people, place them on a shift or remove them.
Automated emails
Welcome, shift confirmation, reminder, cancellation, "finish signing up", friend invitation and coordinator emails go out automatically from templates you control, and templates can be drafted with AI help. Email History shows what was sent and whether it was delivered, opened or bounced.
Coverage and reports
Fill rates by region, area and site, scheduled volunteer hours, shift activity over time, checks for over-subscribed, double-booked and partly covered shifts, and sign-up attribution by UTM tag.
Branding and sign-up flows
Logo, colours, fonts, header and footer, custom CSS and a configurable registration form. Onboarding flows let you build extra public sign-up flows with an AI assistant, each on its own /sign-up/<slug> address.
Tags and notes
Admins can tag volunteers (for example "Corporate team"), filter by tag, and record feedback and private notes.
Salesforce integration
An optional Salesforce sync for campaigns that keep their volunteer data in Salesforce. See Salesforce Integration.
See it in action
- Street Appeals – collection days with many sites
- Festivals & Events – events with different volunteer and crew roles
- Community Cleanups – environmental events across multiple sites
- Sports Events – runs, challenges and multi-venue events
- Conference Volunteering – multi-day conferences with role-based coordination
- Disaster Response Volunteering – using the standard platform to organise response volunteers
Next steps
- How It Works – the workflow from campaign setup to reporting
- Quick Start Guide – get your first campaign running step by step
- Volunteer Management – how volunteer flows work