Campaigns & Events

Overview

A campaign in PurposeTech is one event or volunteer programme: a street appeal, a fun run, a festival, an open day, a clean-up weekend. Each campaign has its own sign-up website, regions, areas, sites and shifts, registration form and email schedule. Organisers who run a single event use one campaign. Organisers who run many events create one campaign per event and manage them all from the same admin portal.

PurposeTech handles the volunteer and crew side. It works beside your ticketing and fundraising platforms and does not take payments or sell tickets.

Creating a campaign

1. Open the campaign menu at the top of the admin portal
2. Choose New campaign
3. Complete the two steps: Basic Setup, then Schedule & Settings

Saving takes you to Campaign Settings. New campaigns come with the standard set of automated emails already scheduled.

The dashboard gives a headline view of the selected campaign. Switch campaigns from the campaign menu at the top.

Campaign Settings

Open Settings > This Campaign > Campaign Settings (owners only). This page holds:

• Name, dates and time zone – campaign start and end, the first shift date and time, and the contact number
• Registration cutoff – see Registration cutoff below
• Subdomain preview dates – optional overrides for the start date, end date and registration cutoff that apply only when someone views the campaign on its purposetech.io subdomain. Use them to preview a later phase of the campaign while your custom domain keeps showing the real dates
• Adopt-a-Site switch – when on, assigning a site coordinator reserves the whole site and it shows as full on the public website. Off by default, so a coordinator assignment leaves the site open for sign-up
• Hide full locations by default – on by default. The public Find Shifts page hides full locations until the visitor turns off "Only show locations with available shifts". If the campaign runs a waitlist, full locations stay listed so the waitlist stays reachable
• Override tenant style settings – see Branding
• Domain & Security and Custom Domain – see Privacy
• Terminology – rename what the portal and public website call regions, areas, sites and shifts for this campaign. Your organisation-level setting applies to every campaign unless a campaign overrides it
• Clone Campaign Data – see Year-on-year campaigns
• Site geocoding – looks up map coordinates for sites that are missing them, for example after a bulk import. New sites are geocoded automatically
• Area images – generates an illustrated banner for each area from its name, region and your brand colours. You can fill in missing images or regenerate all of them
• Danger zone – delete the campaign, or delete all of its regions, areas, sites and shifts

Registration cutoff

Choose how sign-up closes:

• Fixed cutoff date – one date and time for the whole campaign. After it, shifts show "registration closed". Volunteers can still sign in but cannot sign up for new shifts
• Per-shift cutoff – each shift closes a set number of hours before it starts. The volunteer cutoff (default 48 hours) also stops volunteers cancelling. A separate area coordinator cutoff (default 2 hours) applies to area coordinators and above

Use the fixed date when you need to finalise numbers a few days out to prepare materials and printed rosters. Use the per-shift cutoff for events where people can book right up to the day.

Branding

By default a campaign uses your organisation's styling. Turn on Override tenant style settings in Campaign Settings to give one campaign its own look. The campaign style pages only take effect once the override is on, and campaign styles are served per domain, so the campaign needs its own subdomain or custom domain.

Your organisation-level equivalents (Default Styles, Default Brand Colours, Default Header & Footer, Default CSS) apply to every campaign that has not turned on the override.

When to override:

• Co-branded events with a partner organisation
• Campaigns with a distinct visual identity
• Events that need their own header, footer or navigation

For a different page layout – a patterned header band, a split hero or extra content pages – see Campaign Pages & Templates.

Registration form

Design > Registration Form controls the fields volunteers fill in when they register, with a live preview. Unlike the style pages, it does not need the style override: a campaign's form applies as soon as you save it. Default Form Fields sets the organisation-wide starting point.

For each field you can set:

• Required, plus validation rules: valid email, valid phone, minimum length, maximum length, pattern match, or must equal a value (useful for consent checkboxes)
• Placeholder and help text
• Show when – display the field only when another answer matches
• Side-by-side layout – short fields can share a row
• Document links – insert a link to a PDF hosted in your organisation's Documents

There is no multi-select field. For a "tick all that apply" question, use a group of checkboxes.

For separate, shareable sign-up forms built with an AI assistant, see Onboarding Forms.

Automated emails

Each campaign has its own email schedule and templates, managed under Messaging > Email Templates (admins). Each template can be turned on or off and scheduled one of four ways:

• Duration after an action – for example 10 minutes after a volunteer books
• Duration before an event – for example the day before a shift. This is how night-before reminders work
• Fixed date and time
• Bulk send – for custom templates you send on demand to a chosen group

A new campaign starts with these templates:

The two reminder emails are switched off on a new campaign, with fixed dates tied to the registration cutoff. Turn them on and change them to a "before event" schedule if you want reminders relative to each volunteer's shift.

Templates support personalisation variables (such as the volunteer's first name, the campaign name and their shift list), reusable email layouts, AI-assisted editing, a preview, a test send to yourself, and version history. A shift type's email note is added automatically to the shift details in these emails. The email sender address is set under Settings > Campaign API Keys, not on the template. For delivery status, see Messaging > Email History.

By default all campaigns share the organisation's templates. Owners can switch on Use Campaign Email Templates on the Email Templates page so this campaign has its own copies, and can copy templates from another campaign.

See Email & Messaging for more detail.

Privacy settings

New campaigns are private. A private campaign is password-protected: only people with the password can open the website. Manage this on the Domains page (Settings > This Campaign > Domains), where you can also manage the password (at least six characters) and point each domain at a campaign.

When to use a private campaign:

• Soft launch – test everything with your team before going public
• Invite-only events – corporate volunteering, partner events
• Staged rollout – share the password with an early-access group first, then go public
• Internal programmes – staff volunteering that shouldn't be publicly visible

You can switch between private and public at any time.

Campaign lifecycle

Phase 1: Setup (weeks before)

Phase 2: Recruitment (weeks before)

Phase 3: Event day

PurposeTech does not yet record on-the-day check-in. On-the-day check-in is on the roadmap.

Phase 4: After the event

Multi-campaign management

Running several campaigns at once

An organisation can have as many campaigns as it needs:

• Each is independent – its own site, regions, areas, sites, shifts and emails
• One admin portal – switch campaigns from the campaign menu at the top
• Shared organisation records – volunteer records belong to your organisation, so a returning volunteer is the same person across campaigns
• Own address – each campaign can have its own subdomain and custom domain, for example gala.yourcharity.org.nz and appeal.yourcharity.org.nz
• Own look – with the style override on, each campaign can have its own colours, header and footer

To volunteers each campaign looks like a separate site. For admins, Reports includes a comparison timeline that draws filled shifts for every campaign your organisation has run on one chart, aligned by days before each campaign's first event.

Year-on-year campaigns

For recurring events, create a new campaign each year. There are two ways to start from the last one:

• Duplicate campaign (owners, from the campaign menu): creates a new campaign with a new name and dates, and copies the settings, styles, registration form, email templates and schedule, registration cutoff rules and waitlist settings. Tick Also copy this campaign's data to copy the regions, areas, sites and shifts too, rescheduled so the first shift lands on your new first event date
• Clone Campaign Data (in Campaign Settings of an existing campaign): copies regions, areas, sites and shifts from another campaign into this one, using a new start date. The gaps between shifts are preserved

Planning tips:

• Look at last year's fill rates by area and focus recruitment where shifts stayed empty
• Check when sign-ups peaked and time your promotion around it
• Give hard-to-fill areas a buffer with more volunteers needed per shift
• PurposeTech does not record no-shows, so ask your coordinators where people did not arrive

Deleting a campaign

Danger zone in Campaign Settings has two actions. Delete campaign takes the dashboard and public site offline; the data is retained and an administrator can restore it. It is disabled while volunteers are still booked on shifts. Delete Campaign Data permanently removes all regions, areas, sites and shifts and cannot be undone.

Next steps

• Shift Booking – shift setup and the booking flow
• Onboarding Forms – AI-built sign-up forms
• Campaign Pages & Templates – page templates and composable pages
• Organisation Setup – organisation-level configuration
• Email & Messaging – email template configuration and design
• Salesforce Integration – sync campaign data with your CRM
• Glossary – definitions of campaign-related terms