How a participant joins
In the portal: Invitations to invite somebody. Settings, then Cohorts, for a sign-up code.
What it is
There are two ways a person becomes a participant, and there is no third.
They follow a sign-up link, or type the code that link is built from. Anyone holding the link can join.
Somebody invites them by name, one email address at a time or a spreadsheet at a time. Only the people you name can join.
Both routes end in the same place. The person has a login, they have a place in one tenancy, and the starting journeys of whatever cohort they landed in are already on them.
That last part is the first link in the chain. A journey creates deliveries for somebody who is enrolled on it, and a delivery is what puts an item on the home screen. Nothing enrols anybody until one of these two things happens.
The sign-up link, and where it comes from
A sign-up code is a short word you set, and the link is built from it. Every
tenancy can carry one, and so can every cohort. Set the code, and the platform shows
you the link beside it, as Sign-up URL. It is your app's web address followed by
/signup/ and the code.
The link is worked out fresh on every read, so it is always current. Change the code and the link changes with it. Clear the code and there is no link at all.
Where to find it. For a tenancy, open Settings, then Tenants, then the row. For a cohort, open Cohorts and then the row. Both show the code and the link, and both copy in one click.
Which one you hand out decides what the person gets. A tenancy's link puts them in that tenancy with no cohort, so they arrive with nothing on their home screen until a coach or a journey gives them something. A cohort's link puts them in that cohort, and the cohort's starting journeys go on them at that moment. Most of the time the cohort link is the one you want. See Cohorts.
Every code lives in one shared pool. Cohort codes and tenancy codes are checked
against each other, so a code used by a cohort anywhere blocks the same code on a
tenancy, and the message says That sign-up code is already in use. This is what
makes a typed code unambiguous: the platform looks it up, it never guesses.
A code is 1 to 20 characters, letters, numbers, underscores and hyphens, and it is stored in capitals however you type it.
No code means no self sign-up. An empty code closes the link completely rather than falling back to anything, so a tenancy with no code is invitation only. You can add a code later.
Archiving a cohort closes its link. Somebody following it gets
Sign-ups for this code are closed. Check with whoever gave it to you, which is a
different message from an unknown code. The person can see the link was right and
has been shut.
What somebody sees before they are signed in
The link resolves the code before it asks for anything. The sign-up page loads, looks the code up, and redraws around what it found: the name of the thing they are joining, your logo, your brand colour on the button, and your tagline under the heading. A cohort link shows the cohort's name. A tenancy link shows the tenancy's name.
That branded confirmation is the whole point of the step. It is how somebody knows the link they were sent is the one they meant to follow.
Then two fields. An email address, and a password of at least eight characters. One password field with a show toggle, not two fields to retype.
A broken link does not dead end. If the code in the link does not resolve, the code field appears, already filled in with the code that failed and editable, with the reason underneath it. The person can correct it and carry on.
Typing a code by hand works the same way. The plain sign-up page has the code field showing. It checks the code shortly after typing stops, and shows the same branded confirmation once it resolves.
Signing up in a browser does not get them into the app. It creates the account, and then the page tells them so and shows the links to download the app. There is no web version of the app for a participant, so downloading it is the next step either way. The page also shows the sign-up code in a tap-to-copy box, for somebody who would rather sign up inside the app.
The app has the same form. There is a Sign up button under the sign-in screen. When the app was opened by a sign-up link, the code field is hidden and the code is already in hand. It only appears if that code fails to resolve.
What happens the moment they sign up
Three things, in one go.
A login is created for that email address and password.
A participant record is created in the tenancy the code pointed at, in the cohort if the code was a cohort's.
The cohort's starting journeys go on them, if there is a cohort. This is where a new participant's first content comes from, and it is set up on the cohort rather than here. See Cohorts.
Then consent, before anything else. The app shows your consent wording and two buttons. I Agree records it and opens the home screen. I Disagree signs them out and records the refusal, and leaves their record exactly as it was.
Being invited instead
Use an invitation when you know who is coming, when nobody should be able to join without being named, or when the person is staff rather than a participant.
You create the invitation with an email address, and optionally a first name, a last name and a cohort. The platform emails them a link that only works once. The invitation shows in the list as Invited until they use it.
The steps, and the roles, are on Inviting your staff. The route in is the same whichever role you send.
The link lasts 14 days. After that the row reads Expired and the link stops working, and the fix is Resend, which issues a new link and kills the old one immediately.
Inviting a lot of people at once
The Invitations list takes a spreadsheet. Four columns are read: the email address, which is required, a first name, a last name, and the cohort's code.
Every row is invited as a Participant, whatever else the file says, so a spreadsheet can never create a portal login. Staff are invited one at a time, on Inviting your staff.
A cohort code the platform does not recognise is skipped, and the row still lands. The invitation is still sent, and the person arrives with no cohort and therefore no starting journeys. That is deliberate: one stale code in a thousand rows should not fail the whole upload. Copy the codes from the Cohorts list rather than typing them, and check the cohort column on the new rows before you tell anybody the invitations have gone.
What the invitation looks like when they open it
Tell people to set a password. It is the one route that works on both phones and in a browser. Continue with Apple works on iPhone. Continue with Google is not available yet on either phone, and tapping it offers a password instead, so nobody is stuck.
The line naming their account email is worth more than it looks. Somebody sent a staff invitation by mistake gets one more chance to notice before they claim it, and a staff invitation also names the role it sets up.
Nothing exists until they finish that screen
Up to this point they have only been looking. When they set a password and tap through, four things happen in one go:
- their login is created
- they get a place in the tenancy that invited them
- that place carries the role the invitation named
- if the invitation named a cohort, that cohort's starting journeys go on them
The invitation itself flips to Claimed in the same action, so you can see from the list that they are in.
The link works once. A second attempt gets
This invitation has already been claimed, and so does a second person opening a
forwarded copy.
Four states you will see in the list. Invited, Claimed, Revoked, and Expired. Expired is worked out from the date rather than stored, so a row becomes Expired on its own, with nobody doing anything.
When they already have a login
The two routes behave differently here, so choose the route before you send anything.
An invitation covers this case. Claiming with a password on an address that
already has a login checks that password first. Get it right and they keep the one login and
gain a place in the new tenancy alongside the one they had. Get it wrong and the
message is
An account already exists for that email. Sign in with the existing password instead.,
which is the platform refusing to hand somebody else's account to whoever holds the
link.
A sign-up code is for a new login. Signing up with an address that already has a
login is refused with An account with that email already exists, whichever tenancy
that login belongs to. So somebody who is already in one of your tenancies joins a
second one by invitation, not by link.
Signing in with Apple reads a sign-up code only when there is no login yet. An existing account is simply signed in, in the tenancy it already had, and no new place is created.
Claiming an invitation puts the person into the tenancy that invited them, whatever other tenancies that login already belongs to.
*Today: the app comes back on the tenancy that login was last signed in to. The place in the new tenancy is created, and the person is not looking at it. There is no way to change tenancy inside the app, so an address that already has a login is the wrong one to invite.A person can only be in a tenancy once. Inviting somebody who is already in that tenancy re-uses the record they have. It does not move them into the invitation's cohort and it does not add that cohort's journeys, so re-inviting is not a way to change somebody's cohort.
How to check it worked
Open the sign-up link in a private browser window. You should see the name you expect and your own logo. A different brand means the code has landed on something else.
Look at the row. An invitation reads Claimed once it has been used, and the row names the participant it created. A sign-up shows up as a new row in Participants.
Look at their home screen. A participant who joined through a cohort link should already have that cohort's journeys against them. An empty home screen points at the cohort: either the cohort has no starting journeys set, or those journeys are not published. Both are covered on Cohorts.
Next
You can now get a person into the platform by either route, and say what they will see at each step of it.
Cohorts is where the sign-up link and the starting journeys are set, so it is the page that decides what a new participant actually gets.
Inviting your staff is the same invitation flow for the people who run the tenancy rather than the people in it.