Invitations

This guide is about the day-to-day: inviting people, reading what comes back, making sense of it when something looks wrong. Setting the workspace up — spheres and their fields, the team, the keys — is in the Administrator guide.

If you are an administrator, you do both. The split is about the work, not about who is allowed to read which manual.

Everything on this page happens on Dashboard.

What an invitation is

You are not collecting someone’s emergency contacts. You are asking them to share some, and they answer for themselves.

That framing matters when you write the message that accompanies the link, and it matters when somebody doesn’t reply. Nothing about an invitation obliges them.

Adding somebody first

An invitation needs a row to sit on, and Add owner creates it: a name, an email address, and the sphere they belong in. You will only be offered the spheres you are assigned to.

In an internal sphere the address you type is the corporate one. It is how your workspace will know them, it is where the invitation goes, and it is the only address that ever shows up in the list or in search. Their own address comes later and comes from them.

In an external sphere there is no corporate address to use, so the one you type is the person’s own. That is worth pausing on: to add somebody by name here you have to know and type an address that belongs to them, which means you are holding their personal contact details before they have agreed to anything.

You can fix a name — a typo, a married name, the wrong initial — right up until the invitation goes out. After that it is theirs to change, not yours.

Adding somebody creates nothing you can read. It creates a row with an empty card behind it and an invitation waiting to be sent. Creating and sending are two steps on purpose: you can put a whole intake in place, check it, and then send.

Sending one

The paper plane at the end of somebody’s row sends their invitation. They get an email with a link that is good for seven days.

If the email doesn’t go out, their row stays at Not activated and you can try again. A failed send is never silent.

You can only invite people in the spheres you are assigned to. If a sphere isn’t yours, you won’t see it.

Resending

The same paper plane resends. Use it when the seven days have run out, when somebody says the email never arrived, or when it has been long enough that the first one is buried.

Resending is safe: it doesn’t create a second record, and it doesn’t undo anything the person has already filled in.

Inviting in bulk

Tick the rows you want. A bar appears above the list with the count and the invite action in it.

When it finishes you are told how many went out and how many didn’t. Check that number rather than assuming — a bulk send that half-worked looks exactly like one that worked.

Shared invitation links

Sometimes there is no list to work from: a site with contractors coming and going, a clinic’s waiting room, a shift that changes weekly.

Generate invite link makes a link that adds people to a sphere you choose.

A link belongs to one sphere. Everyone who opens it lands there.
It can carry an expiry, or none.
You can only generate links into spheres you are assigned to.

The same panel lists every link that is live, with its sphere, its expiry and how many people have joined through it. That last number is the one to watch: it tells you whether a poster is working before anybody asks.

Each row copies the link, shows its QR code, or revokes it.

A shared link is impersonal, so it asks for more than a named invitation does. The person gives their own email address, which becomes their sign-in, and — if the sphere is set up to ask — their corporate address as well, which is what ties them to your company. The two cannot be on the same domain: if they were, leaving the company would take their sign-in with it.

Opening the same link twice does not create two people.

The QR code is the point

A link you can only paste into an email is half a feature. The QR code is downloadable, so the invitation can live somewhere physical:

Taped to the reception desk of a clinic, for patients to fill in while they wait
Somewhere in your own offices, for employees to scan as they pass
At a site entrance, for contractors who are on the job for a week
Printed into an onboarding pack, so it is done on day one rather than chased in month three

This is usually what makes the difference between a sphere that fills up and one that doesn’t. People will scan a code in front of them; they will not go looking through their inbox for something their employer sent last Thursday.

Download QR gives you the image on its own, so you can put it into whatever you are printing — a poster, a sign at the desk, a page in the onboarding pack.

Give it some words. Somewhere on the sheet you want the name of the sphere, one line saying what scanning it does, and who to ask if something goes wrong. A bare code on a wall gets scanned by nobody: people need to know what they are agreeing to before they point a camera at it, not after.

Revoking

Revoking takes effect straight away, and it reaches every copy at once — the one in the email, the one on the office wall, the one somebody photographed. You do not have to collect the posters, only remember the link exists.

When somebody arrives both ways

If you invited someone by name and they turn up through a shared link with that same corporate address, they become one person, not two. The invitation you sent is claimed rather than duplicated.

When nobody answers

An unanswered invitation is the normal state of a new one, not a problem. People are busy and it is not their job.

Before chasing, check the row. Not activated and Invited mean different things, and the difference tells you whether to resend or to go and talk to somebody — see Understanding grant states.

What doesn’t help is inviting the same person repeatedly over a few days. The link they already have is good for a week, and a second email arriving on Tuesday does not make the first one more persuasive.