Your supporter list already holds your volunteers
uprise is the organising layer: one record per person keyed on phone number and address, volunteers on shifts with turf on their phone, peer-to-peer texting your own team sends by hand, events with capacity and check-in, and a per-channel consent and opt-out register you can put in front of a board. It does not replace the platform that handles your money or the tool that sends your newsletter, and it does not pretend to.
Trusted by progressive Australian campaigns, nonprofits, and causes
Why nonprofits choose uprise
One record per person, not per campaign
Contacts key on the exact phone number and on a normalised address, both held by partial unique indexes in the database rather than by a nightly tidy-up, so one mobile cannot end up on two records however many imports, events and campaigns it arrives through. Texts in and out, door knocks, dispositions and survey answers then read as one timeline on the profile.
Consent you can show a board
Consent is held per contact and per channel, with the source of every change on the row and a durable event for each real transition that records the state it moved from. An inbound STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END or QUIT writes an opt-out, and on every send consent and your suppression list are composed in as a floor the sender cannot switch off.
Volunteers get an app, not a spreadsheet
The field app installs on a volunteer's phone and writes every knock, photo and added household member to an on-device queue, flushing it in order when signal comes back. Church halls and stairwells stop being a data-loss event.
Australian geography, already loaded
Federal divisions, state electorates, LGAs, council wards, SA1 to SA4, the national address file, Census 2021 and SEIFA ship with the product. You can choose where to work from a map instead of a hunch.
Volunteer access is an allowlist
The volunteer role holds a named list of permissions, never a wildcard over a whole domain, so a new area of the product cannot quietly appear in it. Turf, walk lists, knocks, dispositions and their own claimed text conversations are in; the tenant-wide inbox, audiences, blasts and telephony are not. Contact records are the one deliberately wide read, and the FAQ below says so rather than letting you assume otherwise.
A narrower tool, said plainly
No giving pages, no email broadcasts, no website builder. uprise does the organising layer and reads your lists out of NationBuilder or Action Network, rather than asking you to move everything to get one thing.
What you get on day one
Every one of these is built and shipping today. Nothing on this page is a roadmap item.
Peer-to-peer texting
Volunteers claim a batch of scripted first messages or unread replies, press send themselves one at a time, and close each conversation with a disposition. Canned replies sit in the session with them.
Events with real RSVPs
Head counts including guests against capacity, automatic waitlisting, a self-manage link so an attendee can change or cancel without emailing your inbox, check-in at the door, and a CSV of the list.
Supporter segments held as a definition
Lapsed since a date, replied to the March text, answered the survey, RSVPed and did not come: a segment is a definition the count and the send both resolve, not a list somebody re-cut on Friday. Postcode, electorate and SA1 conditions sit in the same builder and answer for the contacts uprise created from the address file. In a sending context consent, suppression and reachability compose in underneath as a floor the author cannot switch off, even by asking.
One survey, door and SMS
One branching instrument, written once: each answer option can carry a disposition, a point on the five-point support scale, and the canned reply that goes back. It runs unchanged at the door in the field app and inside a texting session, so the volunteer on a doorstep and the volunteer on a phone produce one set of numbers for the board rather than two that have to be reconciled.
A shared inbox with claims
Replies land in one queue and an organiser claims the thread, which puts their name on it so the next person can see it is being handled. That is visible ownership rather than a lock – a second organiser can still answer – and what happened at the door sits on the same contact as the message about it.
The money side stays where it is
Charities usually arrive expecting the full stack, so here is the boundary before you spend an hour on the rest. uprise does not handle money from your supporters and is not planning to. Our comparison table records the reasoning: you already run a platform for that, and it is rarely the thing that is failing you. What fails is the twelve months of organising around it.
- No giving pages, no card processing, no ticketed or paid events. The Stripe code inside uprise exists to bill your organisation for its own uprise subscription, and that is the whole of it.
- No email broadcasts either. A blast structurally cannot be an email – the messaging model's channel enum has SMS, WhatsApp and voice and no email member – so your newsletter tool keeps that job. Transactional email does send, framed in your logo and colours: invitations, sign-in links, verification and recovery. There is an event-reminder template and a dispatch endpoint for it, but the endpoint is not on our cron list, so today a reminder goes out when somebody calls it.
- Pull a NationBuilder list or tag, or an Action Network list, into an uprise audience, with pagination that checkpoints so a long import resumes where it stopped. Automatic re-pulls are on by default once a day, and the interval is yours to set anywhere from hourly to weekly.
- Writing results back the other way is built for both platforms, with a circuit breaker that parks a connection as needs-attention and holds the queued deliveries when a credential stops working. Its master switch is off by default, so treat the flow as one direction, in, and ask us where write-back sits before you plan a workflow on it.
- Two files leave the product, both CSV: the contacts in an audience, and the RSVPs to an event. Nothing composes a custom report, nothing lands in your inbox on the first of the month, and there is no warehouse mirror to point a dashboard at, so an acquittal is assembled from those two files and the numbers on screen.
- 1No giving pages, no card processing, no ticketed or paid events. The Stripe code inside uprise exists to bill your organisation for its own uprise subscription, and that is the whole of it.
- 2No email broadcasts either. A blast structurally cannot be an email – the messaging model's channel enum has SMS, WhatsApp and voice and no email member – so your newsletter tool keeps that job. Transactional email does send, framed in your logo and colours: invitations, sign-in links, verification and recovery. There is an event-reminder template and a dispatch endpoint for it, but the endpoint is not on our cron list, so today a reminder goes out when somebody calls it.
- 3Pull a NationBuilder list or tag, or an Action Network list, into an uprise audience, with pagination that checkpoints so a long import resumes where it stopped. Automatic re-pulls are on by default once a day, and the interval is yours to set anywhere from hourly to weekly.
One person, one record, and where the matching stops
Charity lists are usually email-first, and this is the part worth knowing before you import one. uprise resolves identity on the two things a door knock and a text message can actually give you: a phone number and an address. It does that carefully, and where it stops is worth more to you than a claim that it does not.
- The two hard matching keys are the exact phone number in E.164 form and a normalised address string, each held by a partial unique index the migrations maintain by hand. Inside a workspace that makes a second row for the same mobile impossible rather than unlikely, which is a stronger guarantee than a deduplication job that runs overnight and reports what it thinks it fixed.
- Where the keys do not save you: a supporter who arrives once as a cold door and once as a mobile number is two rows, and nothing joins them for you. The merge routine in the product re-points message history, conversations, audience memberships and blast recipients onto one row, and it is wired to no screen and no automatic path today, so a merge is something you ask us to run. It is also not lossless – door knocks, dispositions, survey answers and walk-list rows go with the row that loses – so tidy the duplicates before the doorknock rather than after.
- Email is stored, and it is not one of the two hard keys. A separate, non-destructive pass groups rows sharing an email or a phone under one canonical record without deleting anything, and it runs on the pull from a connected CRM rather than on demand, so a supporter who reaches you through two source systems stays traceable across them. What an email-only supporter is not is textable, or resolvable to a geography. If your list carries no mobile numbers, that is the thing to plan around.
- A contact profile returns the merged timeline: texts in and out, door knocks with the volunteer who logged them, disposition history, latest survey answers, audience memberships and the source records that person came in on.
- Anything outside the fixed columns lands in an untyped metadata bag. There are no user-defined custom fields yet, and the search builder cannot reach that bag at all: the builder's own custom-SQL condition is confined to a masked, non-identifying view that does not expose it.
- 1The two hard matching keys are the exact phone number in E.164 form and a normalised address string, each held by a partial unique index the migrations maintain by hand. Inside a workspace that makes a second row for the same mobile impossible rather than unlikely, which is a stronger guarantee than a deduplication job that runs overnight and reports what it thinks it fixed.
- 2Where the keys do not save you: a supporter who arrives once as a cold door and once as a mobile number is two rows, and nothing joins them for you. The merge routine in the product re-points message history, conversations, audience memberships and blast recipients onto one row, and it is wired to no screen and no automatic path today, so a merge is something you ask us to run. It is also not lossless – door knocks, dispositions, survey answers and walk-list rows go with the row that loses – so tidy the duplicates before the doorknock rather than after.
- 3Email is stored, and it is not one of the two hard keys. A separate, non-destructive pass groups rows sharing an email or a phone under one canonical record without deleting anything, and it runs on the pull from a connected CRM rather than on demand, so a supporter who reaches you through two source systems stays traceable across them. What an email-only supporter is not is textable, or resolvable to a geography. If your list carries no mobile numbers, that is the thing to plan around.
Reporting what changed, not only what you did
Funders and boards ask whether the outreach moved anything, and most tools can only report activity back. A canvass campaign in uprise can be run as a randomised trial against a genuine holdout, which is the difference between a number and a finding.
- Evaluation mode pair-matches SA1s and randomises the pairs into treatment and holdout, with an ICC-aware power preview before you commit to it.
- Once field work exists the assignment is immutable – seed, pairs, codes and power are stored and cannot be edited – so nobody can re-cut the holdout after seeing the result.
- The targeting heat map scores each SA1 over nine factors with persuasion, turnout and coverage presets. Six carry weight in the presets; the other three sit at zero until you move their slider. The knockable-door count gates multiplicatively, so an area with nothing to knock scores near zero however persuadable it looks.
- Where a factor has no data the weights renormalise instead of a value being imputed, and a cell with too little of the preset's weight available comes back as unknown rather than painted cold.
- Alongside it: door counts, contact rate, support identified, volunteer activity, and supporter accumulation against a goal with weekly pace. The live view refreshes on a ten-second poll.
- 1Evaluation mode pair-matches SA1s and randomises the pairs into treatment and holdout, with an ICC-aware power preview before you commit to it.
- 2Once field work exists the assignment is immutable – seed, pairs, codes and power are stored and cannot be edited – so nobody can re-cut the holdout after seeing the result.
- 3The targeting heat map scores each SA1 over nine factors with persuasion, turnout and coverage presets. Six carry weight in the presets; the other three sit at zero until you move their slider. The knockable-door count gates multiplicatively, so an area with nothing to knock scores near zero however persuadable it looks.
Built for every nonprofit model
Environment and climate groups
Build a campaign boundary from federal divisions or statistical areas, cut turf inside it, load the national geocoded address file – about 16.9 million Australian addresses – as cold doors, and run a survey that maps each answer to a support level.
Health and community services
Choose where to work from Census and SEIFA indicators on a choropleth, then run it: shifts with a time, a place, a capacity and volunteer self-signup you approve, route-ordered walk lists per turf, and events with capacity, waitlists and a check-in list for community sessions.
Supporter teams inside a larger charity
Sit beside the CRM instead of replacing it. Pull a list or tag into an audience, work the replies in the shared inbox, keep the opt-out register in one place, and leave the system of record where your finance team expects it.
Questions we get asked
The things nonprofits ask before they switch. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
No, and it is not on the roadmap. There are no giving pages, no card processing and no ticketed or paid events. The Stripe integration inside uprise exists to bill your organisation for its own uprise subscription and does nothing else. Our comparison table lists this as a deliberate decision not to compete: you already run a platform for it, and it is rarely the part that is failing. Keep that platform, and use uprise for the work it does not touch – volunteers at doors, text conversations a real person is having, events with a check-in list, and a consent record you can stand behind.
No. There is no email campaign product of any kind, and it is structural rather than a gap waiting on a sprint: blasts are SMS, voice campaigns run through the dialler, and there is no email channel in the messaging model to select. What does send is transactional email – invitations, sign-in links, verification and recovery – wrapped in your logo and colours, with opens and clicks logged per message so a saved search can filter on them. Your newsletter tool keeps its job and its list.
It gives you the record, not the ruling. Consent is held per contact and per channel with the previous state and the source of every change; an inbound STOP writes an opt-out; your suppression list is applied inside search evaluation as a floor an author cannot remove; each workspace's data is isolated from every other; sessions can be listed and revoked, and two-factor is an SMS one-time code. The limit, plainly: the pre-send check is advisory. It warns when a message lacks Reply STOP wording and when the send falls inside quiet hours – a platform-wide window we set, not a calendar your organisation controls – and neither warning blocks the send. There is no authorisation-statement field and nothing inserts one for you, so authorisation of electoral communications stays your call and your responsibility.
The import itself behaves well – CSV upload runs in resumable batches under a runtime budget, so a large file continues rather than timing out, and a row that fails is counted and skipped rather than sinking the whole upload. Three limits are worth knowing before you commit. The failure report is a count, not a list: it tells you how many rows failed, not which lines, so you fix the file by inspection. Rows without a phone number are not matched on either hard key, so the same person can sit in your workspace twice. And every geographic filter resolves through a geocoded address id the import does not assign – not only electorate, LGA, ward and SA1 to SA4, but postcode, suburb and state, which are the three most people assume will just work. Those conditions answer for the contacts uprise created from the address universe, not for the rows you brought in, so segment an imported list on tags, support level and engagement history instead. A list carrying mobile numbers gets considerably more out of the product than one that does not.
Contact records, yes, and you should know that before you hand out logins. Three roles are assignable – owner, organiser and volunteer – alongside a platform-level super-admin that is not a workspace role, and the volunteer role's permissions are a named list rather than a wildcard, so a new area of the product cannot appear in it by accident. But read access to contacts sits in that list for every role: a volunteer can search your contacts by name, number or address and open any one of them, which returns that person's timeline, dispositions and survey answers. It is scoped to your workspace and to reading, never editing, and it is what makes a canvasser able to look up the household in front of them. If it is more than you want a casual volunteer to hold, the honest answer today is to be selective about who you give the role to, and to tell us, because narrowing it is a change to the permission table rather than a setting. What volunteers definitely cannot reach: the tenant-wide inbox (a text bank scopes every read and write to the signed-in volunteer, so they work only the conversations they claimed), audiences, blasts, and telephony, so no volunteer can place a call.
Your workspace's own branding is on every plan: block and landscape logos, a hero image, primary and secondary colours and custom CSS that is sanitised before it renders, applied to volunteer join pages, public RSVP and action pages, embedded insights and the frame around transactional email. Two limits. There is no favicon field, so a browser tab still shows ours. And running several brands or sub-tenants from one account is a Scale-plan capability, listed on the pricing table as multi-tenant and multi-brand – one workspace, one brand, is what the lower plans do. Every workspace gets its own subdomain, yourname.uprise.org.au, shown as its primary address. Your own domain is not shipped: the Domains panel shows the intended flow with a coming-soon badge and the controls disabled, which we would rather you saw now than discovered in week three.
Grassroots and Scale are the two publicly listed plans, and both are quoted rather than priced: Grassroots is a philanthropically funded licence you apply for and we assess, Scale is sized per organisation. The automated dialler and its robo-polling, public click-to-call pages, multi-brand, WhatsApp, and sending from your organisation's own Twilio numbers and your own verified email subdomain are Scale capabilities; with them off, texts go out through the shared platform sender and a dialler campaign can be drafted but not activated. Note that a click-to-call page, where it is switched on, is the one place a member of the public rather than your staff places a call. Everything else described on this page runs on Grassroots, bounded by its seats – and that one deserves a number rather than a word. The licence as it stands carries two workspace seats, the check runs at the moment somebody joins, and a volunteer holds a seat exactly as your supporter-engagement manager does, so how many people need logins is a sizing conversation to have with us before you invite the third one. The contact allowance behaves differently: it is reported back to you as headroom rather than enforced at the point of import. One thing to raise with us rather than infer: the pricing table marks advanced analytics as a Scale row, so if the evaluation and targeting work in the third section above is why you are here, ask us where it lands for your licence before you sign.
See it against your actual supporter list
Bring a list, an event you have coming up and the outreach you are trying to run. We will show you the parts that fit and name the parts that do not, in that order.