Your first campaign

This page walks through building a first campaign at the concept level — what you set up and in what order, not the console screens themselves. Click-by-click steps with the actual console UI land in Using the Console as that section fills in.

Parts of this flow — member accounts, email invites, the member share page, and QR codes — describe the member experience UnitTally is building toward the broader public launch, not capability live in a public account during the closed alpha. It’s laid out here as the designed model so the whole arc reads end to end.

Before a campaign needs anyone to sell for it, the organization itself exists — created once, not per campaign — with a roster of members: the scouts, players, students, or dancers who’ll be selling. The treasurer or admin invites each member by email to join; that invitation creates a member account tied to the organization. For a member under 13, the invitation goes to a parent or guardian instead, who manages the account on the member’s behalf.

One person can belong to more than one organization under a single login, so a parent with kids in two programs, or a student on two teams, doesn’t need a second account — just a second invitation accepted. A roster is also durable: it typically outlives any single campaign, so this step doesn’t repeat every time a new campaign goes up.

A campaign starts in draft. Draft campaigns aren’t visible to supporters, so there’s no rush — set the campaign name, description, and dates, and decide which payment methods it accepts (manual, online card, or both; an organization without its own Stripe account runs manual-only). If the campaign has a fundraising target, set the goal amount now; it drives the progress indicator supporters see once the campaign goes live.

If pickup happens in distinct waves — a pre-holiday batch and a post-holiday batch, for example — this is also where fulfillment blocks with their own order window (and an optional pickup window) get added. A campaign with a single pickup date doesn’t need one.

Inside the campaign, add each product being sold. For anything that comes in more than one priced version — sizes, package tiers — add variants, each with its own price and stock count. For anything that’s a selectable attribute rather than a separate SKU — a color choice, an engraving line, an add-on — add options instead; an option is a sibling of the variants under the product, and can carry its own price adjustment and affect the product’s stock on its own, independently of any variant.

Set a stock cap on any variant that has a real supply limit, and a low-stock threshold if the treasurer wants a heads-up before it runs out mid-campaign. See Campaigns, products, variants & options for how the pieces relate.

With products in place, review the campaign against its dates and goal, then move it from draft to active. Active campaigns are live on the organization’s storefront and start accepting orders per the payment methods enabled in the draft step.

Once the campaign is active, each roster member can sign in to their own member page and get a sharing link and QR code scoped to this organization. Distributing it from there is up to the member — texting it, printing the QR code, posting it to a team group chat — and every order placed through it credits that member automatically. See Attribution for how the credit mechanism works.

• The fundraising model — the full season arc, including reconciliation and fulfillment.
• Fees and caps — start of the Core Concepts section: fees, payment methods, the data model, attribution, and fulfillment in depth.
• Using the Console — step-by-step instructions for the actual console screens (coming soon).