External Deeds

Some organisations don't want users to apply through your platform. They have their own process: a form they've built, a system they already run, a flow they don't want to change. External activities accommodate that without creating workarounds that confuse everyone.

What it does

An external activity is a regular activity on your platform, but when a volunteer clicks "apply," they're redirected to an external URL instead of starting an application. Nothing gets created in Deedmob: no application record, no conversation, no activity on your end. The volunteer lands on whatever page the organisation set up and takes it from there.

From a discovery standpoint, the activity behaves like any other. Volunteers find it through search, it shows up on your platform, and it looks the same as everything else. The difference only kicks in at the moment of application.

Why it can be useful for workshops and events

Workshops and community events are often managed through dedicated tools that already handle registration natively, such as Eventbrite, a ticketing platform, an LMS, or a municipality's own event portal. An organisation may still want to surface the activity on your discover page for visibility, without duplicating the registration process. External activities make this possible: the activity appears in the central browsing experience, but volunteers are sent directly to the platform already handling sign-ups.

This is different from standard volunteering roles, where Deedmob acts as the management system tracking applications, conversations, and activity reports. For a one-off workshop run through Eventbrite, that infrastructure isn't needed, and routing registrations through Deedmob could just create unnecessary friction.

What you need to enable it

Two settings control this, and both are off by default. Your Deedmob contact enables the feature on your whitelabel and specifies which activity types can be marked as external. So please let us know which types you want to open up.

Once those settings are in place, organisation admins and moderators can mark individual activities as external through the normal activity creation form. The activity still goes through your regular workflow: draft, approval if you require it, then published. The external setting is just a property of that activity, not a separate category.

What you give up

When a volunteer applies through an external activity, Deedmob has nothing to track. You won't see who applied, you can't manage a waitlist, and your analytics won't reflect any activity for that activity. The organisation owns the entire process from that click forward.

If an organisation wants to run its own intake, it also runs its own reporting. You can show the activity on your platform, but you can't report on what happens next. You're the one who knows best what works for your platform.

How to get started

Get in touch with your customer success contact. We'll enable the settings on your platform and walk you through which activity types make sense to open up. The configuration is a deliberate choice, not a default, so you stay in control of where it applies.