Street Appeals

The challenge

Street appeals are high-stakes, time-pressured operations. A national charity might need to fill hundreds of collection sites on a single day, each requiring several volunteer shifts. The logistics are hard:

• Thousands of volunteers need to sign up, pick a site, and confirm their shift – often weeks in advance
• Regional coordinators manage their own areas but need visibility into the national picture
• Coverage gaps are invisible until it is too late – you find out on the morning of the appeal that three sites have no one
• Communication is a tangle of spreadsheets, email chains, and manual follow-ups
• Returning volunteers from previous years need to be re-engaged without starting from scratch
• Corporate groups adopt sites and need reservations managed separately
• Day-of changes – gaps, walk-ins, weather – need tools that work on a phone in the field

Most charities manage this with spreadsheets, shared drives, and sheer willpower. It works until it does not, and when it does not, it is collection day.

How PurposeTech solves it

Branded volunteer signup

Each campaign gets its own white-labelled site where volunteers browse regions, areas and sites, pick a location and shift, and sign up. There is no password: volunteers sign in with a link sent to their email.

Volunteers can:

• Search for an area – find a location near them without scrolling through hundreds of options
• See availability – full sites can be hidden by default (a campaign setting), and the number of spots remaining can be shown on each shift
• Join a waitlist – if their preferred shift, site or area is full, they can queue for a space (the campaign setting decides which level the waitlist applies to)
• Manage their own bookings – see, change or cancel shifts from their account, until the campaign's registration cutoff or lockout window before the shift
• Invite a friend – pass a booked place to a friend by entering their details; the friend gets an email and the booking records who referred them

Regional coordination at scale

The geographic hierarchy – Region → Area → Site – is designed for street appeals:

Delegate management to area coordinators and site coordinators:

• Coordinators see only the sites they are assigned to, so the roster stays focused
• They can add volunteers who turn up without booking, move volunteers between shifts and sites, and reserve shifts for corporate groups, all from the roster on their phone (the Move volunteers tool is for larger screens)
• They export the roster as a PDF or CSV before heading out, so they have a printed backup when phone reception drops
• Admins can switch on the At-a-Glance view on the roster page: one grid of every site, its shifts and who is on them, including held and waitlisted places

Reporting and coverage tracking

The reports dashboard gives you a campaign-wide view. You can see at any point:

• Fill rates by area, with a coverage bar for each area and site, and a region filter
• Where the gaps are – specific shifts at specific sites that need filling
• A map of sites coloured by how full they are
• Cumulative filled shifts over time, compared against your earlier campaigns
• Who made each booking – the volunteer, a friend, a coordinator or an admin
• Which marketing links brought volunteers to the sign-up forms, if you tag your links with UTM parameters
• Rostering problems such as over-subscribed shifts, double bookings and sites with only partial coordinator coverage

After the appeal, the Post Campaign report compares sites and campaigns. Collection takings (EFTPOS and cash) can be typed in per site, and the site's Collection tab shows this campaign against earlier ones.

Shift management across hundreds of sites

Build the structure in bulk. The Add Campaign Data window takes sites pasted from Excel or uploaded as CSV or XLSX, and the Shift Generator creates the same morning and afternoon pattern across every site you tick. Then use the admin Shifts page to adjust times, capacity and shift types:

Adopt-a-Site for corporate groups

When a business wants to adopt a collection site and provide its own volunteers, coordinators use Adopt-a-Site (glossary):

1. Switch on Adopt-a-Site (Reserve Shifts) on the site's roster
2. Select the slots to hold across the site's shifts
3. Enter the contact's first name, last name, email, mobile and organisation
4. Confirm the hold

The reserved slots show as held on the roster. A campaign setting decides whether a reservation makes the site show as full to the public.

Salesforce sync

For organisations that use Salesforce, PurposeTech can sync with it, switched on per campaign in Salesforce Sync settings:

• To Salesforce – each booking is written as a Volunteer Hours record against the contact, site and shift, with the shift's scheduled duration as the hours
• From Salesforce – contacts, regions, areas, sites, shifts and area coordinator assignments
• One-way option – the campaign can be set to sync from Salesforce to PurposeTech only
• Sync Conflicts – records that fail to sync are listed for an admin to review and resolve

The sync runs on a schedule, every few minutes. It removes the export and import step most organisations repeat after each appeal. The hours are scheduled shift hours; PurposeTech does not record hours actually worked.

Automated communications

PurposeTech sends the right email at the right time. The standard set covers a welcome email, shift confirmation, reminders before the shift, a message when a coordinator changes someone's shifts, a nudge for people who started signing up but did not finish, and an invitation email when a volunteer passes a place to a friend. Waitlisted bookings have their own wording.

Each shift type can carry an email note (for example "collect your bucket from the coordinator"), which is added to the shift details in the volunteer's emails. You can also schedule your own emails for a set date or relative to the event, and send a bulk email to everyone with a booking, to a role such as coordinators, or to a list of email addresses you paste in. Sent emails and their delivery status are listed in Email History.

Returning volunteer recognition

Volunteers who took part in an earlier campaign are already in your organisation's volunteer list. For next year:

• Duplicate the campaign to copy the regions, areas, sites, shifts, shift types, registration form, branding and email templates, with dates moved to the new year
• Import extra volunteers from a CSV; anyone whose email is already in the system is skipped rather than duplicated
• Returning volunteers sign in with their existing email, so there is no second record to merge

Operational timeline

On-the-day check-in is on the roadmap.

Get started

Ready to run your street appeal on PurposeTech? Get in touch to see a demo tailored to your campaign, or explore the Quick Start Guide to understand the setup process. Planning a different kind of one-off event – a clean-up, festival, or collection day? The same tools apply.