Welcome to Dapple! Just to recap, Dapple is a submission and application management tool designed to streamline your administrative workflow by:

Setting up Dapple takes around 30 minutes for your first project. You'll create your organisation, configure payments and team access, build your first project and submission form, then publish. This guide takes you through every step in the order we recommend.

You'll need: your organisation's logo and brand colour, a Stripe account (or your bank details if you'd like to create one during setup), the email addresses of any team members you want to invite, and a clear idea of the questions you want creators to answer in your submission form.

Here's a short video on how to set up a brand new organisation from scratch and start taking submissions in minutes.

Please note - some of the user interface has been updated since recording.

From your Dapple dashboard, open Settings → Organisation. Add your organisation name, logo, country and primary industry. These details appear on your public submission pages and on emails Dapple sends to creators on your behalf. Here's more information on setting up your organisation settings.

If you plan to charge submission fees or sell tickets, connect a Stripe account in Settings → Payments. Click Connect with Stripe and follow the prompts. New to Stripe? You can create an account directly from this flow — it takes a few minutes. For full detail see How to Connect a Stripe Account

Open Settings → Users → Add User. Enter the email of each teammate, choose a role (Admin, Member, or Reviewer), and send the invite. They'll receive an email with a sign-in link. Reviewers see only the projects you assign them to. For role details, see How to Add a User

From the dashboard, select Projects and take a look at the template projects created already. The quickest way to set up is to edit an existing project. Read in more detail about how to create projects.

Inside your project, open the Submission Form tab. Add fields by dragging blocks from the right-hand panel — short text, long text, file upload, multiple choice, payment, and so on.

You should do the following:

When you've finished your form and got creative with your design and background image, it will look a little something like this...

Stages are the different parts of a submission journey. In Project Settings → Stages, add the stages your submissions will move through (for example: Received → Longlist → Shortlist → Selected → Rejected). Here's how to set up Stages.

Once you've created all your projects and tested your forms, you'll want to bring them all together in a single listing page that acts as a central hub for all of your organisation’s active projects and submission forms. Think of it as your organisation’s creative portal—a simple link you can share anywhere that always stays up to date. Here's how to set up your Page.

Before opening to creators, run a test submission yourself. Open your project's public submission link in an incognito window and submit as if you were a creator. Confirm payment, file upload, and notification emails all work as expected. See Test Your Submissions

When you're happy with the form, open the project's Visibility setting and change it from Draft to Public. Public projects appear on your organisation's submission page and accept entries from creators. Use Private if you only want to share the link directly. See Set Your Submission Forms Live

If you want to create panels of reviewers or judges, you'll need to set these up in due course. Here's a guide to setting up review panels.