How It Works

The PurposeTech workflow

PurposeTech follows five stages, from campaign setup through to reporting afterwards. A single clean-up and a multi-site appeal follow the same flow. The difference is how many sites and shifts you create.

1. Set up your campaign

An admin creates a campaign in the admin portal. This is where the planning happens.

Create the structure

For a simple event with one site and a few shifts, this is a short job. For a large campaign, the Add Campaign Data window on the Overview page lets you paste or upload a CSV or XLSX of sites, generate shifts across many sites at once, and review before saving. Hovering a region or area also offers Make copies, and Duplicate Campaign can copy last year's regions, areas, sites and shifts into a new campaign, rescheduled around the new first-shift date. If you use Salesforce, the sync can bring sites and shifts across.

If your event does not use these words, rename them in the Terminology settings (for example "Venue" for "Site").

Configure the experience

• Branding – logo, colours, fonts, header and footer, and custom CSS. Set once on the tenant, or override per campaign
• Registration form – standard fields plus your own questions, with a live preview. Fields can be text, email, phone, date, checkbox, select, radio, text area and address fields, and can show only when another answer matches
• Email templates – welcome, confirmation, reminders, abandoned sign-up and more, each editable and schedulable, with a test-send
• Privacy – campaigns start password protected. Switch this off when you are ready to open sign-up to the public
• Registration cutoff – a single cutoff date, or one that follows each shift's start time

Assign coordinators

• Area coordinators look after the sites in one or more areas. Add them from an area's Coordinators tab
• Site coordinators look after one site. Assign them from the site, or from the Volunteers page
• Site contacts record a contact person for a site

2. Volunteers sign up

Once the campaign site is open, volunteers use it themselves.

The signup flow

1. Find a site – volunteers browse the sites on the Find Shifts page. By default, full sites are hidden, and a toggle lets visitors show only sites with space
2. Pick shifts – they choose one or more shifts. Full shifts can offer a waitlist if you have turned one on
3. Hold – the chosen shifts are reserved for them for a limited time while they finish
4. Details – they enter their name, email, phone and any custom questions
5. Confirm – they follow the link in an email to confirm, which turns the hold into a booking

Volunteers do not need to create a password. They sign in later with an emailed link to see, change or cancel their shifts and update their details.

What happens behind the scenes

Friends, groups and manual entry

• Invite a friend – a signed-in volunteer can add a friend onto their shifts. The friend gets an invitation email and the referral is recorded
• Adopt-a-Site – an area coordinator or admin can reserve shifts for a group, such as a corporate team, by entering the group's contact details
• Admin entry – admins can add volunteers by hand or import them from a CSV file on the Volunteers page

3. Communicate automatically

Automated email

A template can be scheduled for a fixed date, a time after something the volunteer did, a time before an event (for night-before reminders) or as a one-off bulk send. Templates can be drafted and edited with AI help, and shift types carry their own email notes, so setup crew and collection volunteers can receive different instructions.

Bulk sends and history

A bulk-send template can go to a list of email addresses or to a segment of volunteers by role and number of shifts. Email History lists what has been sent and shows delivered, opened and bounced status.

4. Manage on the day

The roster

Coordinators open the Roster on the campaign website after signing in. It is not part of the admin portal. It shows, for each shift at the chosen site:

• Each volunteer's name, email and phone
• Badges for Waitlist, On hold, Unverified, Group and Notes
• Empty places with an Add volunteer option
• A count of places booked against places needed

Coordinators can download the roster as a CSV or PDF, and a consent form where one has been set up.

Day-of actions

On-the-day check-in is on the roadmap. Until then, the roster shows who is booked, not who turned up.

Who sees what

Whether a coordinator's reserved shifts also close the site to the public is a Campaign Settings switch, off by default.

The roster works on a phone, so most coordinators use it there.

5. Report and follow up

What you can report on

Volunteer hours are scheduled hours (shift length across booked places), not hours worked. Reports and the Volunteers table export with Download CSV.

After the event

1. Thank your volunteers – use a bulk-send email template
2. Record feedback – add positive or negative feedback, private notes, or a Blacklisted flag on a volunteer, and use tags to group people
3. Sync to Salesforce – if your campaign uses the sync
4. Export – CSV from the Volunteers table and from rosters, PDF rosters

Planning your next event

• Volunteers stay in the system and can be filtered and emailed for the next campaign
• Duplicate Campaign copies the structure and shifts, and the email templates, into a new campaign
• Campaign comparison and Filled by Area show where coverage was thin last time

Next steps

• Quick Start Guide – step-by-step setup instructions
• Campaign Setup – detailed campaign configuration
• Roster Management – day-of coordination in depth
• FAQ – quick answers to common questions