User roles
TL;DR — CampaignCTRL has six roles. Four sign in: Owner and Admin (full access), Organiser (runs a volunteer team), and Volunteer (does the outreach). Two are field agents reached by a private text link: Captain (election-day turnout) and Recruiter (signs up supporters).
A campaign is a team effort, and CampaignCTRL gives everyone on the team the right amount of access for the job they do. Knowing who’s who makes the rest of the app easier to follow.
There are two ways to get into CampaignCTRL:
- Accounts — team members who sign in with their own login: the Owner, Admins, Organisers, and Volunteers.
- Field agents — helpers who never sign in. The campaign sets them up by name and mobile number, and the app sends them a private link by text message that opens just the part of a campaign they’re helping with: Captains and Recruiters.
That split is the key thing to remember: a Captain or a Recruiter isn’t a login — they’re a helper the campaign sets up by name and phone, then reaches by text.
graph TD
U[Who uses CampaignCTRL]
U --> A[Sign in with an account]
U --> F[Work from a text link]
A --> A1[Owner]
A --> A2[Admin]
A --> A3[Organiser]
A --> A4[Volunteer]
F --> F1[Captain]
F --> F2[Recruiter]
style U fill:#f5f5f5,stroke:#666,stroke-width:2px
style A fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:3px
style F fill:#fff4e6,stroke:#ff9800,stroke-width:3px
style A1 fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:2px
style A2 fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:2px
style A3 fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:2px
style A4 fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:2px
style F1 fill:#fff4e6,stroke:#ff9800,stroke-width:2px
style F2 fill:#fff4e6,stroke:#ff9800,stroke-width:2px
Roles that sign in
These four roles each have a login and see the app through the lens of what they’re allowed to do.
Owner
The Owner is the person in overall charge of the organisation — your campaign’s account in CampaignCTRL. There’s exactly one, usually the person who set it up, and the owner holds the highest level of access in the app. An owner can do everything an admin can (below), plus two things no one else can: only the owner can delete the organisation, and the owner’s account is protected from deletion, so control of the campaign can’t be lost by accident.
Admin
An Admin runs the organisation day-to-day with full operational access, working alongside the owner one step below. Admins set up the campaign’s foundations — elections, the map and its boundaries, messaging inboxes, locations, and organisation settings — manage users and what each one is allowed to do, organise volunteers into teams under organisers, and see every report. They also have the final say on the lead reviews their team feeds them.
Owner and Admin are the only two roles that skip the finer, feature-by-feature permission checks: everything operational is open to them. The one line an admin can’t cross is the owner’s — an admin can’t delete the organisation.
Organiser
An Organiser leads a team of volunteers and keeps an eye on the work that team produces. Each volunteer is assigned to one organiser, and the organiser tracks each volunteer’s target (the number of leads they’re aiming for) and how many they’ve actually brought in.
Organisers sit in the middle of the lead pipeline. A lead is a potential supporter a volunteer captures while out in the field — a new person, or a match to someone already in your people list that needs confirming. Volunteers capture the leads; the organiser reviews them.
An organiser can read your people and activities, see their own volunteer team, review the leads those volunteers capture, and approve or reject each match to keep your voter data clean. They also see a progress overview for their team.
An organiser can’t create or delete leads (that’s the volunteer’s job), add or remove volunteers from their own team (an Owner or Admin does that), or see any other organiser’s team.
Volunteer
A Volunteer is your boots on the ground: a signed-in team member who carries out the campaign’s outreach. Working through an activity, they knock on doors, make calls, or send texts to the people on the list and record what each person says — their answers to your survey, how strongly they support the campaign, and the outcome of the conversation. Capturing those survey responses is the heart of the role.
Volunteers can also capture the occasional lead — a new person they meet in the field.
Volunteers join by accepting an invitation and completing sign-up, and an organiser can review their work.
A volunteer can work the activities they’re assigned, record survey responses and support levels for the people they reach, add new people, and capture leads.
A volunteer can’t browse your existing people list — they add people, but don’t see the whole voter database — or manage other users, change settings, export data, or see other volunteers.
The sign-in roles at a glance
| Role | Can do | Key limit |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | Everything, including deleting the organisation | One per org; the account is protected from deletion |
| Admin | Everything operational — setup, users, roles, reports | Can’t delete the organisation |
| Organiser | Supervise a volunteer team; review and approve their leads | Read-only on people; can’t create/delete leads or assign volunteers |
| Volunteer | Work activities and record survey responses; add people (and capture leads) | Can’t browse the voter list or manage the team |
Captain and Recruiter aren’t in this table — they’re field agents who get in through a private text link, not sign-in roles.
Field agents (access by text link)
Captains and Recruiters are helpers the campaign sets up by name and mobile number. They never sign in. Instead, the app texts them a private link that opens only their slice of a campaign. The link carries a time-limited token and stays valid for 14 days, and the campaign can switch a field agent on or off at any time — switching them off ends their link straight away.
Captain
A Captain is your election-day worker for one specific polling area. They’re tied to a single poll — a geographic slice of the turnout effort — inside a Get Out The Vote (GOTV) activity. (GOTV is the election-day push to turn out the people who already support you; it’s one of the activity types.)
When you assign a captain to a poll, they get a text with their link. From there they can see and work the voters in that poll, and record who’s been contacted or has voted. To keep them focused on the people worth turning out, a captain sees only Strong and Weak supporters — the support levels your campaign has recorded — within their area.
Recruiter
A Recruiter grows your supporter base. Where a captain is tied to a place, a recruiter is tied to people — the voters they personally sign up. Each recruiter owns the list of people assigned to them, and you can assign people to a recruiter in batches.
A recruiter can be added to any kind of activity, not just GOTV. Once they’re switched on they get their text link, follow up with their own list of people inside that activity, and record their interactions. Their results are tracked automatically — how many people they’ve recruited, and how many of those went on to vote — and you can export those numbers as a report.
Captain vs. Recruiter at a glance
| Captain | Recruiter | |
|---|---|---|
| Tied to | A poll (a geographic area) | The people they recruit |
| Works which activities | GOTV only | Any activity |
| Sees | Strong & Weak supporters in their poll | The people they recruited |
| Gets in via | A private text link (valid 14 days) | A private text link (valid 14 days) |
| Signs in? | No | No |
| Results tracked | — | Recruits, and how many voted |
How the roles fit together
The roles split into one supervised team and two independent field roles.
graph TD
OA[Owners & Admins<br/>oversee the campaign]
OA --> O[Organiser<br/>supervises a team]
O --> V[Volunteer<br/>does the outreach]
OA -. set up .-> R[Recruiter<br/>signs up supporters]
OA -. set up .-> C[Captain<br/>election-day turnout]
style OA fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:3px
style O fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:2px
style V fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0066cc,stroke-width:2px
style R fill:#fff4e6,stroke:#ff9800,stroke-width:2px
style C fill:#fff4e6,stroke:#ff9800,stroke-width:2px
Your signed-in team runs as a simple chain: Owners and Admins oversee the campaign, each Organiser supervises a group of Volunteers, and those volunteers do the outreach and report back to their organiser. The two field agents are set up by the campaign but work on their own, reached only by a text link — a Recruiter signs up and looks after the voters they personally bring in, and a Captain turns out the supporters in their polling area on election day.
Terms
- Account vs. field agent — an account signs in; a field agent works from a text link.
- Lead — a potential supporter a volunteer captures in the field, for an organiser to confirm.
- GOTV — Get Out The Vote, the election-day turnout push.
- Poll — a geographic slice of a field activity.
- Support level — how strongly a person backs your campaign (e.g. Strong, Weak).
Related
- How it fits together — the building blocks these roles work with.
- Activities — where GOTV, polls, and field work happen.
- Surveys — how support levels get recorded.