How does activity approval work? Review activities before they get published.

You can decide to require approval for activities on your platform before they go live. This article explains how that works, what an organizer sees while they wait, and how to approve or reject an activity.

What activity approval is

A platform can require review for one or more activity types: volunteering, community event, workshop, or peer-to-peer. When a type is on this list, every new activity of that type goes into a review queue before it's visible to anyone outside the organization. When a type isn't on the list, activities of that type go live the moment the organizer publishes them.

This setting is off for every activity type by default. You choose which types to require it for: volunteering, community event, workshop, peer-to-peer, or any combination. It's not something you switch on yourself in the platform, so ask your Partnership Manager at Deedmob to turn it on (or off) for the types you want.

One thing approval doesn't override: the organization itself still needs to be approved first. An activity from an organization that hasn't been approved can't go live, no matter what the approval setting says.

What organizers see

When an organizer publishes an activity of a type that needs approval, the activity gets the status "Waiting for approval" instead of going live. The organizer and their organization's admins can still see it, but nobody else can, and it won't show up in search.

Reviewers are emailed automatically. For a regular activity, that's the platform's admins and moderators. For a peer-to-peer activity, that's the organization's own admins.

There's no time limit on the queue. An activity can sit waiting for approval for as long as it takes someone to review it, nothing decides it automatically.

How to approve or reject an activity

Open the activities overview in your admin area.
Find the activity with the status "Waiting for approval." Open it.
Review the details, then click Approve or Reject.
- Approve publishes the activity immediately. It becomes visible in search, and the organizer gets an email confirming it was approved.
- Reject deletes the activity. There's no way to undo this or bring the activity back, so only reject when you're sure. The organizer gets an email saying it was declined.

A few things worth knowing before you click Reject:

Moderators can approve an activity, but only platform admins can reject one, because rejecting deletes it.
For a peer-to-peer activity, the organization's own admins can approve it, but they can't reject it. Only a platform admin can reject a peer-to-peer activity, even though the organization's admins were the ones emailed to review it.

Peer-to-peer activities still show up in the platform's own review queue alongside regular activities, so you can approve or reject them from there too, even though the organization's admins were notified first.

Quick support checklist

If someone reaches out asking why their activity isn't visible yet, walk through these steps:

Is the organisation itself approved? An unapproved organisation can't publish anything, regardless of the activity-type setting.
Check its status. If it says "Waiting for approval," it's sitting in the review queue, not published yet, and needs a reviewer to approve it before it appears anywhere.
Is this activity type actually on the approval list for this platform? Check the platform settings.
Is it peer-to-peer? Then the review sits with the organisation's own admins, not yours, so point them there.
Has a reviewer actually looked at it yet? Remind them there's no time limit, so it genuinely might just be waiting.

If you think an activity type shouldn't need approval, or should, that's a platform-wide setting only your Partnership Manager at Deedmob can change. It applies to every activity of that type on your platform, not just the one in front of you.