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Setting up your account and organisation

Your organisation is your Accolade workspace. Events, categories, nominations, judges, sponsors and guests all live inside it, and one business normally has one organisation. Everything in this article is in Setup → Settings & Branding, which has seven tabs: Organisation Profile, Branding & Theme, Email Configuration, Notifications, Custom Domain, Data & Privacy and Billing & Plans.

Before you start

1. Organisation Profile

Set Organisation Name, Legal Entity Name, Tagline, Company Registration No., VAT Number, Industry, Company Size and Description; then Primary Email, Support Email, Phone, Fax and Website; then Address Line 1 and 2, City, Postcode and Country; then LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram and Facebook.

Do the legal entity, registration number, VAT number and address first. They are what appears on the paperwork you generate for sponsors and suppliers, and correcting an invoice after it has been sent is far more work than filling in a field now.

2. Branding & Theme

This tab is deeper than a logo upload. It carries Display Font (Headings), Body Font, Base Font Size, Border Radius and Card Style; Hero Background, Hero Overlay Opacity and Social Sharing Image; Public Page Footer Text; and the certificate settings — Certificate Template, Certificate Logo Position, Signatory Name and Signature Upload. Button styles preview live, and Preview Public Page shows a nominator's view before you commit.

Set the signatory name and signature before you need certificates, not the week of the ceremony. See White-label and branding for what each plan allows and how far the Accolade branding can be removed.

3. Email Configuration

Set Sender Name, From Email, Reply-To Email and BCC (Admin Copy), plus the Provider, API Key and Sending Domain. Send Test Email is on the same tab — use it, because a wrong reply-to address is only ever discovered by the person who replied and got nothing.

Email templates live here too, listed by Template, Subject, Last Updated and Status, with + New Template and Edit.

4. Notifications

Per-event notification routing across Email, Slack, SMS and In-App, with a Priority per row, plus Daily Digest, Weekly Summary and Digest Recipients. Enable All and Mute All set the lot at once.

Quiet hours are configured here, with a start, an end and a Timezone — Europe/London, America/New_York or Asia/Dubai. That timezone selector is the only one in Settings; there is no separate localisation tab. Critical notifications, security and overdue items, are still sent during quiet hours.

5. Custom Domain

Where the subdomain and DNS verification live, with Re-verify DNS and Preview Login Page. Enterprise and Agency only — the full walkthrough is in Setting up your custom subdomain.

6. Data & Privacy

Retention settings for Nomination Data, Financial Records, User Activity Logs and Deleted Data Purge; the four Legal Pages URLs (Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Terms of Service, Data Processing Agreement); a Data Subject Requests register with + New Request; and consent management. The operational buttons are Export All Data, Anonymise Test Data and Purge All Data.

Purge All Data does what it says. Take an export first — see Exporting and deleting your data.

7. Billing & Plans

Shows whether a billing relationship and payment method exist for this workspace. Plan changes are handled through Stripe rather than in this tab — see Billing, upgrades, and invoices.

Common problems

What's next

Not a customer yet?

The Free plan runs a real event on the same codebase and the same database as every paid tier, so you can follow this guide against your own data. First reply on support is 1 business day on Professional, 4 business hours on Enterprise and 1 business hour on Agency; Free is best effort with no written target. The full targets and severity definitions are on /support.

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