Charity Portal: Getting Started
The charity portal is a separate workspace inside your existing account. Here is how a charity gets access to it, who on the team can do what, and what the overview is telling you.
Getting Access
There is no separate charity login. The portal is a workspace that appears inside the account you already sign in with, once that account is a member of a charity. There are two ways to become one.
Applying to List Your Charity
If your charity is not on the platform yet, the listing application walks through four steps: finding your charity, telling us about it, contact and location details, and the terms and agreement. You can save a draft part-way through and come back to it. If an application is sent back to you, it can be amended and resubmitted rather than started again.
Being Invited to an Existing Charity
If your charity is already listed, an existing administrator invites you by email. The invitation link shows you which charity and which role it is for before you accept, and asks you to sign in to accept it. Accepting with an account whose email differs from the invited address is allowed, and it is recorded when it happens.
Switching into the charity workspace
Once your membership is active, a charity workspace becomes available from the workspace switcher at the top of your dashboard. Selecting it swaps the sidebar and the dashboard over to the charity view. If you do not see it, the membership has not been activated yet, so check with whoever invited you.
What Each Role Can Do
Every member of a charity holds a role, and that role decides what is offered to them in the portal. Your own role is shown on the charity overview.
- Viewer: read-only. Profile, offices and updates can be looked at but not changed, and the pages say so rather than failing when you try
- Editor: everything a viewer can do, plus editing the charity profile, managing offices and writing, publishing and archiving updates
- Administrator or owner: everything an editor can do, plus the team: inviting people, changing a member's role, removing a member, and resending or revoking an invitation that has not been accepted
Permissions are checked on the server
Hiding a button is a convenience, not the control. Every change is authorised again when it reaches us, so a request that your role does not allow is refused whichever way it arrives.
Reading the Charity Overview
With the charity workspace selected, your dashboard becomes the charity overview. It carries your charity name and its current status, then four cards.
Charity Overview
- Verification: verified, in review, documents submitted, unverified, or verification failed
- Your role: the role your own membership holds
- Primary country: the country recorded for the charity
Verification
An owner or administrator submits verification documents from this card, for example your governing document or a recent letter from your regulator. Verification then moves through these steps, and every owner and administrator is emailed at each one:
- Documents submitted: we have your documents and our automated checks are running: each file is virus-scanned, and your registration number is looked up in the public charity register where we are connected to it
- In review: the automated checks have finished and our review team is looking at your documents
- Verified: your charity is verified
- Verification failed: the card shows the reviewer's reason, and you can submit new documents
Your Reach
Four figures, all calculated by us rather than in your browser. Each shows a dash while it is still loading or if the figures cannot be fetched, so a dash means "not available right now" and not "zero".
The two figures that count individual supporters, wills and reactions, read "Fewer than" a small number until enough people are counted that none of them could be singled out. We never send the exact figure below that point, so it cannot be seen anywhere.
- Profile views: visits to your public charity profile
- Wills including you: completed wills that name your charity (drafts are not counted)
- Published updates: updates of yours that are live
- Supporter reactions: reactions those updates have drawn
Monthly Activity and Update Views
Monthly activity covers the last twelve months. For each month it shows the pledges (gifts naming your charity) and the wills they sit in, counted in the month each will was completed. A month with only a few reads "Withheld", for the same privacy reason as the reach figures, so a quiet month and an empty one look the same. Occasionally a busier month is withheld too, so that no small group can be worked out from your total.
Update views lists your ten most recent published updates and how many times each has been shown to visitors on your public profile. Views are anonymous, so these are always exact.
Quick Actions
Shortcuts to your profile details, your offices, your updates and the public charity directory. The link to your own public profile is offered only once the charity is approved, because until then there is no public page to open. If your role is viewer, these read "view" rather than "manage".
Approval and Verification Are Two Different Things
These two are shown separately because they mean different things, and it is common to be approved but not yet verified.
- Status is whether your listing is live: pending, approved, suspended or rejected. Your public profile page and the directory entry follow this one
- Verification is whether we have checked the charity's documents. A verified charity's updates go live as soon as they are published; otherwise an update joins a review queue first
What is in the portal
Alongside the overview you have your charity profile, your offices, your team and your updates. Charities also get their own conversations and enquiries, and a calendar, all scoped to the charity rather than to you personally. You reply to a supporter inside their enquiry, and we email them to say the charity has replied.
Can’t find what you’re looking for?
Our support team is here to help. Contact us and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
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