Welcome to Dapple! Just to recap, Dapple is a submission management tool designed to streamline your administrative workflow by:
Centralising all submissions in one organised location
Eliminating scattered digital files and the need for email inboxes
Creating a structured system for tracking and processing submissions
Now you've created an account and signed in, let's get you set up and ready to go 🚀
Quick To-do list
1. Set up your General Settings
The first very simple step is to customise your General Settings. To do this, head to the top right-hand corner, select the cog for your Organisation Settings > General > Basic
Make sure you are happy with:
Organisation name, logo, industry and location.
Tags
Tags - We've added some default ones for you, but we'd recommend creating your own industry/business-specific tags.
Templates
We've created a few basic message templates to get you on your way; however, you'll want to create your own.
Payments
If you want to charge submission fees, you'll need to connect a Stripe account. You'll need to follow these instructions to either connect an existing Stripe account or create a new one.
2. Set up your Projects
Once you've added some general settings, you'll next want to set up your projects. A project is a core element of Dapple where you define the parameters of your submission opportunity, including what you're looking for, the guidelines, open/close dates, submission forms, payments if required and review parameters.
When you first create an account, we will have created some industry-specific project templates already to get you started. Select Projects in the side panel and then select the small three dots to edit an existing project, duplicate it or create a new one from scratch.
Within each project, you should set the following up.
3. Create Submission Forms
Within a project, you can set up forms - you can create these from scratch, using the smart form generator or tweak the existing template forms. You should do the following:
Customise the form fields
Customise the design of your form by changing the colours, adding header images, adding background images and other design edits
When you've finished your form and got creative with your design and background image, it will look a little something like this...
4. Create your Listings Page
Once you've created all your projects and tested your forms, you'll want to bring them all together in a single, branded URL 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 more info on the benefits of using pages. To set this up, head to:
Organisation settings > Basic
Select the Pages option and select Create Page
You'll then be able to add descriptions, guidelines, choose which projects appear on this page, choose a custom URL and brand the page with images or colours. See here for more information on how to set up your Page.
When you've finished your page and got creative with your design and background image, it will look a little something like this...
5. Go live!
Once you have created a project, set up a submission form and created your page, you'll want to test them out before you set them live.
To test a submission form:
Head to Projects and select the small three dots in the top right-hand corner of the project card.
Select the Submissions Page to see the form and fill it out as if a creator.
Fill out the form as if you were someone submitting material and remember that the submission will be made under your own user account name. Any test submissions will not count towards any submission limits you have and will automatically be marked as a test.
To test your listing page:
Head to the Dashboard and select Pages & Forms, and your page will appear as the first option. Select it and then follow the links to your submission forms.
Set everything live:
Once you've tested your forms and pages, the final steps are to change the visibility from draft to public or private on your projects, copy the URL and then add to your website and channels. Remember, you should add these links to any place a link can be hosted, whether this be a button on a website, an email campaign or social media etc.
And with that, you're live with Dapple!
Go ahead and invite some more users to the system and assign them different permissions. If you run contests, awards or have teams of reviewers, you can then follow these steps to create Review Panels.