Your organization invitation

Somebody has invited you to help run their festivals on FilmScorecard, and emailed you a link. This page covers what that email is, what accepting involves, where you land afterwards, and what to do when the link has stopped working.

This is not a judging invitation. If you were asked to score films, see Your judging invitation instead.

The email

The subject is "You are invited to join their organization", and the message is short:

You have been invited to join Northern Lights Festival on FilmScorecard.

Your organization role: Member.

Accept the invitation here: a link

This invitation expires in 14 days. If you were not expecting it, you can ignore this message.

Three things worth knowing straight away:

The link works once. Accepting uses it up.
It lasts 14 days from the moment it was sent.
If they send you a new invitation, the older link stops working. Always use the newest email.

Replying to the message reaches the organization that invited you, not FilmScorecard, whenever they have set a support address.

Ignoring it is a real option. Nothing happens to you if you never open it.

What the link opens

A page headed You have been invited to an organization:

Accepting adds you to the organization that invited you, with the role named in your invitation email. Invitation links last 14 days and work once.

The page does not name the organization, and does not name your role. That is deliberate — it means a stranger with a guessed link learns nothing from it — and it is why the email is worth keeping: the email is the only place the organization's name and your role are written down.

You never get a "page not found" here. Whatever the link says, it opens something that explains itself.

If you are not signed in

The page offers Create an account and Log in, with one line: "Sign in or create an account to accept. You will come straight back here."

Both carry the invitation with them, so signing in returns you to this page with the link intact. Accept it from there.

Create an account opens the sign-up screen with your address filled in and no role question, because the invitation has already settled it. It still asks for your name and for the box that agrees to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy; see Creating an account.

Accepting

Choose Accept invitation. That is the only step.

Nothing is granted by opening the link — only by pressing the button. A mail scanner or a link preview that follows the URL cannot use your invitation up.

Accepting takes you into the organization you just joined — see Where you land afterwards.

The link is a key

Whoever is signed in when the button is pressed is who gets the access. The link does not check that you are signed in as the address it was sent to, so it is worth treating like a password:

Do not forward it. Anyone who opens it while signed in to their own FilmScorecard account joins the organization in your place.
The organization's own records note both the address the invitation was sent to and the account that redeemed it, so a mismatch is visible to them afterwards.

If the invitation reached the wrong address, ask them to send a new one — that cancels the old link.

If you are already in that organization

Accepting keeps the role you already have. It never lowers it, and it never raises it either — if you were invited as an org admin but are already a member, you stay a member and should ask them to change your role directly. Any festivals named on the invitation are added, skipping the ones you can already reach.

If you already own an organization

Nothing stands in the way. An invitation as Owner makes you an owner of the organization that invited you, whatever else you own — one person may own several organizations. You keep everything you had in your own, and the two are kept entirely apart: see Working in two organizations.

This changed. Accepting an Owner invitation used to be refused with "You already own an organization" when your account owned one already. That page is gone.

What still holds is the other half of the old rule: you cannot create a second organization yourself from the setup form. Owning a second one comes only from somebody who already owns it — see Setting up your festival.

Where you land afterwards

Accepting takes you into the organization that invited you, even when you already belong to, or own, another one:

When you can open two or more of its festivals, you land on its Overview.
When you can open one, you land on that festival's season dashboard, on its starred season (or its newest).
As an Owner or an Org admin of an organization with no festival yet, you land on its Add a festival form.
If you were invited as a Member and given no festival yet, there is nowhere in that organization for you to land. You go where logging in would take you — another organization you belong to, if it has somewhere to land, or otherwise a page headed You're in. Your access was granted all the same. Ask whoever invited you for a link to the festival you will be working on; that link now works for you, and you can bookmark it.

Logging in later still lands you in the first organization in your account menu's order, which may not be this one: open your name in the top-right corner and choose it from the Organizations group. See Which organization you land in.

If you were invited as an Owner or an Org admin, Organization settings is yours from the navigation once you are inside.

"This invitation is unavailable."

This invitation is unavailable.

That heading replaces the button when the organization that invited you cannot take anybody on at the moment. Nothing happened: you were not added, and the invitation is not used up. The same link works again once the organization is available — as long as its 14 days have not run out. Reply to the invitation email to ask them when.

When the link no longer works

This invitation link is no longer valid

It may have expired, or it may already have been used. Ask the organization that invited you to send a new one. Nothing has changed on your account.

FilmScorecard deliberately does not say which of those it was. The same page appears for a link that expired, one somebody already used, and one that was mistyped or truncated by an email program. Naming which would let a stranger with a guessed link learn something about real invitations.

What to do:

Check you opened the newest email. A resent invitation replaces the earlier one.
Check the whole link came through. Some mail apps break long links across lines — copy the whole thing into the address bar.
Ask them to send a new one. That takes them one click, and it works even if the first one never arrived.

What you can do once you are in

That depends entirely on the role the email named:

Member — nothing org-wide. You reach the festivals you have been granted, and only those. If you were granted none yet, you can sign in and see the organization and nothing else, until somebody adds one.
Org admin — every festival in the organization, its people and its settings.
Owner — the same, plus ownership of the organization itself, including its payout account — even if you own another organization too.

Your role can be changed at any time by an owner or an org admin, and so can the festivals you reach. If either looks wrong, ask them — it is one change on their side.

Questions this page cannot answer

Which festival you are meant to work on, what you are expected to do and by when, and why your access looks the way it does are all questions for the organization that invited you. Reply to the invitation email.

FilmScorecard support, through the Contact link at the foot of any log-in screen (see Contacting us), can help with getting into your account and nothing else.