Getting your campaign onboarded

This page is for the person doing the setup — the county chair, executive director, or campaign manager whose account can create other accounts. If you just received an invite link, you don’t need any of this: open the link, set your password, and you’re in (Logging in & accounts).

Campaign Setup is the five-step wizard that stands up a candidate and their whole team at once. Nothing is created until you press Start Campaign on the last step — you can draft, close the tab, and come back.

New organization? We set that up for you

Campaign Setup adds a campaign inside your existing organization. If you’re a brand-new customer — a new county or committee — your Voterra onboarding includes standing up the organization itself: your county’s turf map, your voter roll, and your first admin login all arrive ready to use. Reach out and we’ll have you set up, usually within a day.

Have these ready

• The candidate’s basics — full name, the office exactly as it appears on the ballot, party, and election date.
• Your roster — for each teammate: their real email address, what they’ll do (roles are explained inline as you pick them), and where they’ll work. No passwords needed: everyone gets an invite link and sets their own.
• Room on your plan — if your subscription meters seats, the wizard checks the roster fits before you can launch and tells you if it doesn’t.

The five steps

1. Race — who is running, and where on the ballot.

   Full name, office, party, election date, and a district label. One field to treat with care: the short name (auto-filled from the candidate’s name) becomes the campaign’s permanent identifier, so don’t reuse one from a past campaign — the field warns you if you try.

   

2. Turf — the campaign’s reach.

   Pick the districts, subregions, or precincts the campaign covers. A running readout shows how many voters and precincts that adds up to. Everything a teammate can see must sit inside this reach, so the wizard describes each staffer’s area relative to the candidate’s — an out-of-district assignment reads as “outside this campaign” while you can still fix it.

   Running county-wide? That’s a checkbox, not an empty field — leaving the turf blank and ticking county-wide are the same thing, and the wizard asks you to confirm it so a forgotten field never silently becomes everything.

   

3. Roster — the team that runs it.

   One row per person: email, role, and area. Start from a template — a kitchen-table campaign, a field team, or a full bench — and edit from there. The role menu only offers what your account is allowed to grant.

   

   Combinations that work well:

   • Campaign manager — full management inside the district, with permission to add their own field team later.
   • Field organizers — coordinators scoped to one or two subregions.
   • Canvassers — scoped to a single precinct or subregion.
   • Texting lead — the SMS manager role, if the campaign will text.

4. Compliance — the money boundaries.

   Contribution limits for the office and the filing authority the campaign reports under. Blank fields mean the defaults apply; if no rule exists yet for this office, the wizard points it out without blocking you.

   

5. Launch — the pre-flight check, then Start.

   The wizard re-checks the whole draft every time you change a field and lists anything that needs attention next to the row that caused it. Blockers (a teammate assigned outside the candidate’s turf, a typo’d or already-used email, more people than seats) disable the Start button until fixed. Warnings (like a missing contribution rule) leave it enabled — read them, then go.

   

   Press Start Campaign when the blocker list is empty. Everything is created in one transaction — if anything fails, nothing half-exists.

After Start Campaign

1. Every teammate gets an invite link. No account is ever created with a password somebody else chose. The results screen lists one link per person, each with a copy button — send them however your campaign already communicates (email, text, a printout at the kickoff meeting).
2. Starter routes are one more click. The wizard can cut a first batch of walking routes from the campaign’s turf, ready for a coordinator to hand out. It’s the same engine as the Autoplan Routes button, pointed at your new campaign.

Your first-login checklist

Ask the new campaign’s manager to walk through this on their first login:

County dashboard renders Login → County Map should show their voter counts by district.

Voter search works Voters view → filter by precinct → the counts look right.

First route creates Voters map → lasso a cluster → Create Routes → assign a canvasser.

Canvass logs a knock On a phone: open a stop, record the outcome, watch the dashboard update.

What each checkpoint looks like:

Checkpoint 1 — the county dashboard renders.

Checkpoint 1 (drilldown) — district → subregion → precinct.

Checkpoint 2 — voter search and filters.

Checkpoint 4 — canvassing from a phone.

Sanity check — Admin → Users shows one row per teammate, with the role and area exactly as you set them in the roster step.

Go deeper

Your team, by role What each role sees and does.

Manage users Adding, editing, and re-inviting a single teammate after launch.

Import a voter roll The other side of onboarding — keeping the voter data fresh.

Region scoping How 'everyone works inside the campaign's turf' is enforced.