Help
Short answers. If yours isn't here, email doug@dbb1.dev.
1. What is Causly?
A place to run volunteer sign-up sheets — shifts, booths, bake-sale slots — and, if you want it, to send the people who signed up a text message about it.
2. How do parents sign up?
You publish a sheet and share its link. They open it, pick a slot, and fill in their name, email address and mobile number. They get a confirmation email, up to a daily limit, with a link to cancel if their plans change. You see the roster fill up as it happens.
3. Do they need an app or an account?
No. There is nothing to download and nothing to create. The sheet is a web page, and the confirmation is an ordinary email.
4. Why does the form ask for a mobile number if we aren't texting anyone?
Every sheet asks for a mobile number and for agreement to be texted, so a slot can become a text list later without going back and asking everyone again. If your organization isn't sending texts, nobody is texted — the number just sits on your roster.
5. How does someone start getting texts?
They have to say yes twice. Ticking the box on the sheet isn't enough on its own: we send that number one message asking it to reply YES, and only a YES subscribes it. Until then it shows as pending on your roster. A mistyped digit therefore gets that one message and nothing after it — it stays pending, and an announcement is never sent to it.
6. How does someone stop getting texts?
They reply STOP to any message. It takes effect immediately, and it sticks — that number stays out even if someone adds it to a list again later. Replying HELP sends instructions, and START starts them again.
7. What does it cost?
Sheets, rosters, CSV downloads and the print-out are free, with no card. Texting is the Pro plan: $29/mo for each organization, including 1000 message segments a month. A segment is up to 160 characters of plain text; one curly apostrophe, em dash or emoji — the characters a phone inserts for you — drops the whole text to 70, and most emoji count as two of those 70, so 35 fill a segment. A longer text uses more than one. Confirming one number costs 2 segments of the monthly allowance rather than one: the text asking it to reply YES, and the welcome it gets back when it does. Your organization's name goes at the front of that first text, so if it contains a curly apostrophe, an em dash or an emoji the ask alone is 2 or 3 segments instead of 1. Opting in 200 families from your sheets uses 400 of the month's 1000 segments as they confirm, and as much as 1200 — more than the month includes — with a name like that and a welcome at its full length, in which case sending pauses part-way through the drive. Full breakdown on the pricing page.
8. Can we use Causly without texting at all?
Yes, and plenty of groups do. On Free the sheet, the confirmation emails, the roster, the CSV and the print-out all work.
9. Who can see our roster?
The coordinators you invite to your organization. Another organization using Causly cannot see it. We can, because we run the service and hold the data for your organization — the privacy page says what we do with it. You can download the roster as a CSV or print it whenever you like.
10. What happens to our data, and how do we get it out or delete it?
It is your organization's. Download the roster as a CSV any time; email doug@dbb1.dev to have your data deleted, and we will confirm when it is done. What we collect and who else handles it is written out on our privacy page.
11. Something's broken, or we're stuck.
Email doug@dbb1.dev and say what you were doing. A real person reads it.
See the pricing page for the full breakdown, or what we collect on the privacy page.
Still deciding? Start a free sheet — it takes about ten minutes and costs nothing.
Start a free sheet