Shared access with Ellacard organizations

How shared access works for Ellacard organizations.

By Alex Exarhos, May 7, 2025

Create stronger connections between employees and teams with an Ellacard organization account

In addition to numerous other tools and benefits, an Ellacard organization account allows you to invite multiple users to share access to your pre-paid credits or use your subscription to send greeting cards, group greeting cards, and event invitations with RSVPs. Organization administrators have advanced access controls to manage what their members can do along with detailed analytics about how their members are using Ellacard. This article focuses specifically on how shared access works for Ellacard organizations. Other articles go more in depth on specific organization tools like custom branding or how to address specific use cases like automating employee birthday cards. Check out our blog for more.

Adding users to an Ellacard organization

An Ellacard organization is automatically created when the registration form is submitted (it’s free to create an Ellacard organization). Completing that form makes you the sole administrator, which gives you access to the business portal where you’ll find all the tools to manage your organization.

There are two ways to add users to your organization from the users tab in the business portal:

Share an “Invitation link”

Invitation link settings

Click on the "invitation link" button to configure your organization's invitation link. Anyone who follows this link can join your organization. You can choose to limit that ability to specific email domains, like @department-1.example.com and @department-2.example.com. For example, you might publish the link on an internal company page where any employee could technically share it. By constraining that link to specific domains, there is no security concern with it being shared. You can also recycle the link if it gets leaked which will immediately invalidate it.

Add email addresses directly

Click the “Add users” button to add a list of email addresses directly — the pop-up dialog will automatically extract all email addresses from any text you paste into the box. Those users will receive an email from Ellacard inviting them to join your organization. They’ll also see a corresponding notification if they sign in to Ellacard using an invited email address, allowing them to accept or reject your invitation.

Users tab in the business portal

The table in the users tab shows the list of all invited users and whether or not they have accepted the invitation — only users who explicitly accept your invitation count as members of your organization and can use your benefits. Click on the delete icon at the right of a user’s row to remove them from your organization.

Note that our business subscription plans have constraints on the number of users that can be added. If you are at the capacity of your plan, new users will not be able to join your organization.

Organization administrators

Once a user has joined your organization, you can elevate them to be an organization administrator. This gives them access to the business portal, which also gives them full access to manage users. You can add / remove organization administrators from the overview tab in the business portal.

Add organization administrator dialog

Note that Ellacard subscriptions are explicitly managed by one organization administrator. To change who manages your organization's subscription, first make sure you've added at least one other organization administrator, and make sure that that person has a valid payment method saved in their Ellacard account. Then open the overview tab and click on the "Subscription details" button in the "Credits / subscriptions" section. In the dialog that pops up, you'll see a line indicating who your subscription is currently managed by, and next to that will be a button that allows you to change it.

Usage analytics

There are three tabs in the business portal that give you insight into how your organization’s members are using the platform: the user-activity tab, the orders tab, and the automations tab.

User activity

User activity tab in the business portal

The user activity tab shows a downloadable table of activity of specific members of your organization.

You can filter and sort the table using the options presented. Note that some of these metrics may include users external to your organization, e.g. if they were invited to sign one of your organization’s group cards. You can use the “Show internal users only” checkbox to include / exclude these users.

Orders

Orders tab in the business portal

The orders tab shows a downloadable table of all the orders that have been placed by members of your organization. Note that most of the columns in this view are hidden by default, toggle the Hide / show columns section to show a list of all available metrics.

Click on an individual row in the table to view the full summary. The “Open order details…” button at the top of the dialog that pops up will let you view the order as the organization member who created it, which gives you the full ability to make any changes. Note that this table includes rows for each individual order placed using the bulk-order tool.

Administrators can manage orders created by organization members

Automations

The automations tab shows you all the automations created by members of your organization. Once enabled, Ellacard automations create orders automatically on pre-configured dates.

As with individual orders, you have the ability manage the details of automation as if you were its owner by clicking on a row.

Pricing

There is no charge to create an Ellacard organization account — by default, when an organization member checks out, they'll be charged the same prices as a non-organization user.

Pre-paid credit

If you pre-pay for Ellacard credit with an organization account, your credit will be applied to the whole organization — any member of your organization will be able to use that credit to send personal cards, group cards, event invitations, video templates, create automations, or place bulk orders. Pre-paid credit does not apply to gift cards. Please contact us directly if you’d like to pre-pay for gift card credit for your organization: support@ellacard.com

Subscriptions

Use an Ellacard subscription to automatically renew organization credits for all members

Ellacard offers two types of subscriptions: individual and business. The organization tools are not available to those with individual subscriptions. Every subscription plan allows all organization members to create unlimited personal cards, group cards, and event invitations, but there are caps on the number of sends (a send is when you use Ellacard to invite a group-signing contributor or deliver the final card / invitation to a recipient via email or text message). The different tiers of our business subscriptions also have caps on the number of members who can share access to your organization.

The overview tab in your business portal shows your subscription status and how much credit / how many send credits you have remaining. You can upgrade your subscription at any time — select the appropriate plan for your needs and you’ll be automatically charged the difference in price from your previous plan.

Use cases

An Ellacard organization account with shared access helps your company foster a community of appreciation amongst your employees / teams. You can use Ellacard to send out group-signed cards for birthdays, work anniversaries, holidays, and other special occasions. Use shared access with an Ellacard organization to let individual employees directly create and send cards for those occasions and more, like one-off cards containing kudos / thanks from the entire team or leadership for a job well done. Check out our post on how to use Ellacard to foster a culture of employee appreciation to boost morale and retention or learn more about the importance of workplace appreciation here.