Running a campaign

Suppliers, tags and access

Supplier tags, brokers holding several brands, invitations, and how isolation is enforced.

8 min read

A supplier tag is the supplier an item belongs to, and it is the unit of access. A contact can see an item if, and only if, they hold that item's tag in that campaign. Everything else about supplier permissions follows from that one rule.

The access model

Thing	Definition
Vendor	A supplier or brand in your directory: a name, a short code used in reference IDs, and optionally your own internal ID.
Supplier tag	The same supplier, seen as a permission. Items carry one; contacts hold them per campaign.
Contact	A person with a sign-in. One contact, one email, across every campaign and every supplier they act for.
Membership	The link that says "this contact holds this tag in this campaign". Created when you invite them.
Invitation	The record of that contact being on the campaign, and of whether their email was sent, suppressed, or failed.

Everything a supplier can do is checked against the tag at the moment they do it, not at page load, and not from a list computed when they signed in. A link to another supplier's item returns a not-found, not a permission error, so it does not even confirm the item exists.

The supplier directory

Suppliers & Contacts holds every supplier in your organization and every contact.

Add a supplier
Name, and optionally a code and an internal ID. The code is what appears in reference IDs, so ACME gives you Q4PROMO-ACME-003. Leave it blank and one is derived from the name.
Set the internal ID
Your own supplier number from your ERP or buying system. It rides along in the exports, which is what lets somebody reconcile a campaign export against a purchasing extract without a lookup table.
Leave the rest to the campaigns
Suppliers are also created automatically by the participants bulk import, whenever a pasted name is not already in the directory.

Inviting contacts

Contacts are invited per campaign, at CampaignSuppliers & access, which is also step 4 of the wizard.

Bulk import

One contact per line:

[email protected], Mary Miller, ACME Foods
[email protected], Mike Chen, ACME Foods; Beep Beep Snacks

Commas separate the three parts; semicolons separate the supplier tags. Unknown suppliers are created. Re-pasting is safe: contacts and tags are deduplicated, so fix the bad lines and paste the whole block again.

One at a time

Open Invite a single supplier contact.
Email, and a name if they are new to the product.
Tick each supplier tag they may act on.
Invite contact.

Option	Effect
Suppress invite emails	Adds the contact and the tags without mailing them. Use it when you are staging a list, or when a supplier asked you to hold off.
Inviting on a draft campaign	Nothing sends. Every invitation goes out together when you open the campaign.
Inviting on an open campaign	Sends immediately.
Inviting on a closed campaign	Offers to auto-grant submission-scoped edit access, since otherwise the contact arrives at a campaign they cannot write to.

A contact who has never signed in gets an account email with their sign-in details. An existing contact just gets the campaign invitation. Every send, and every failure, is in LibraryEmail log, and failed invitations are retried by the sweep up to five times.

The participant roster

Below the invite forms, the roster lists every contact on the campaign and the tags they hold, with a way to change them. This is the screen to check when a supplier says "I can't see it": nine times in ten they are on the campaign but missing the tag.

The Suppliers and access screen: a bulk import box for pasting contacts, collapsed sections for inviting one contact and for co-managers, and a Participants and tag assignments table listing each contact against the supplier tags they hold. — The participant roster. The tags column is the answer to most access questions. Open full size

Brokers

A broker is a contact holding several tags. They see one dashboard with every brand's items, and choose which brand they are acting for when they submit.

Items are always attributed to the brand, not to the broker. Reference IDs use the supplier's code, so Q4PROMO-ACME-003 is ACME's item regardless of who typed it.
The Excel template is per brand, because the reference IDs and the supplier are baked into it. A broker downloads one per tag.
Two brokers with adjacent brands on the same campaign never see each other's items.

Tag scope, for screen sharing

A broker about to share their screen with one client can narrow every supplier screen to a single tag from Brand filter in the top bar, beside their name. Supplier screens say brand where this one says tag, because that is the word a broker uses. The filter reads All brands until they pick one; after that it turns amber and names the brand, and an amber notice on each supplier screen reads Filtered to <brand> until they clear it. The other brand names are inside the picker and appear only while it is open, so no other brand is on screen at rest.

The choice holds across every page and every tab, and outlives the visit: it is set once before a call rather than re-set on each screen. A contact holding a single tag has nothing to filter and never sees the control.

The scope covers campaigns, items, activity and notifications. A notification about one brand's item hides while the broker is scoped to another, and the unread count in the top bar hides it too. Account-level notices stay visible under every scope, because they are about the person rather than a brand: campaign announcements, milestone reminders, co-manager grants and password events.

Post-close edit access

When a campaign closes, supplier editing locks. Sometimes one supplier needs back in: they mistyped a price, or they were added late and their submission is empty. That is an edit access grant, and it is deliberately narrow.

Scope	Unlocks
Item	One line. The supplier can edit that item and nothing else. Granted from the item screen.
Submission	That supplier's whole set of items in this campaign, and the ability to add new ones. Granted from the item screen or automatically when you invite a contact to a closed campaign.

A grant is always issued against one supplier tag. A grant recorded for a different tag never unlocks an item, even if the item and submission IDs would otherwise match.

Requests from suppliers

A supplier looking at a closed campaign gets a Request edit access button. The request appears on the campaign overview as an amber card and on the participants screen, where you approve or reject it. Approving issues the grant and notifies them.

Co-managers

On the internal side, a co-manager has full campaign-manager rights on one campaign. Add them from CampaignSuppliers & accessCo-managers.

Scope is that campaign only. It is not a role and it grants nothing anywhere else.
Every action stays attributed to whoever performed it, so the audit trail and the item history show the co-manager's name, not the owner's.
Revoke removes it immediately.

Org admins can manage every campaign in their own organization without being named as co-managers. There is no cross-organization access of any kind, for anybody. For how the supplier experiences all of this, read The supplier's walkthrough.