A contact role describes what a person does for their organization, such as primary contact, billing contact, or voting delegate. Your Rhythm account has its own list of roles. Contact forms offer these roles, contact role compliance rules require them, and the Portal uses them to grant permissions. This article explains how to create, edit, deactivate, and delete the role definitions.
What It Controls
Each contact role can use any combination of these three special behaviors:
- Administrative. A contact with an administrative role is an administrator for their organization, with every Portal permission your Rhythm account grants to organization contacts.
- Assigned automatically to all new contacts. Every contact created in an organization, or moved into one, receives the role while the role is active.
- Assigned to an organization's first contact. A contact receives the role only when they join an organization that has no other contacts, and only while the role is active. Rhythm checks this when the contact is saved, so if every contact later leaves an organization, the next person to join receives the role.
When you turn on an automatic assignment flag, Rhythm uses it only for contacts created or moved after that point. It does not add the role to contacts who are already in the organization.
Automatic assignment has only two options: every new contact or an organization's first contact. You cannot automatically assign a role to a hand-picked group of contacts. For a role such as recruiter or committee liaison that belongs to only a few specific people, assign it by hand on each contact.
Roles used for special-purpose lookups elsewhere in your account, such as an exhibition or admin contact for an event or exhibit, are ordinary contact roles that you configure here. They are not separate link fields. Because they are roles, more than one contact in an organization can hold a role like Admin Contact. That means the role does not always point to one specific record the way a dedicated field would, so keep that in mind when a query or report expects exactly one match.
Where to Find It
Go to Setup › Contacts › Contact Roles. This opens Manage Contact Roles, where you can review the roles in your Rhythm account. The Auto assign? column shows No, All contacts, or First contact, and the Admin? column shows Yes or No, so you can quickly see how each role behaves.
- Create Contact Role opens a blank form.
- The clone icon on a row opens a new role prefilled from that role, without its identifier.
- The edit icon opens the role so you can change it.
- The delete icon removes the role after you confirm.
Prerequisites
You need the permission your administrator grants for contact role setup. Without it, you will not see this page or its actions.
The Settings
| Setting | Options | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Name: | Any text | Empty | Required. Staff see this name in role pickers, lists, and reports. Two roles may share the same name |
| ID: | Letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens | Suggested from the name on a new role, such as "Billing Contact" suggesting BILLING-CONTACT | Required. Contacts, contact role compliance rules, and the API use this permanent identifier. You cannot change it after you save the role for the first time |
| This is an administrative role with complete access to the organization | On, off | Off | Makes contacts with this role administrators of their organization on the Portal |
| Assign this role automatically to all new contacts | On, off | Off | Gives the role to every new or moved-in contact while the role is active |
| Assign this role to the first contact to join an organization | On, off | Off | Gives the role to the first contact in an otherwise empty organization while the role is active. This setting is hidden after you check the box above, but Rhythm still keeps its value. Checking both is harmless because a role given to everyone is also given to the first person |
| Status: | Active, Inactive | Active | Controls whether the role is offered anywhere and whether its automatic flags take effect |
Warning
Nothing warns you if you check both This is an administrative role and Assign this role automatically to all new contacts at the same time. Together, they make every new contact in every organization an administrator of that organization on the Portal. Use that combination deliberately.
A role also stores a description and custom field values, but the current form does not show them or let you edit them. When you save the role, Rhythm keeps the description and custom field values that are already stored.
Dependencies and Precedence
- A contact's assigned roles are recorded on the contact. Staff view and change those roles from the contact's own record.
- Contact role compliance rules require a minimum or maximum number of contacts in a role for each organization type. Only active roles that apply to an organization type can have a compliance rule.
- The contact role compliance email can be sent to contacts who hold selected roles when an organization falls out of compliance.
- If you configure a contact role to appear as a Key Contact on the organization screen, that name appears only after the role is assigned to the actual person on their contact record. Adding the role to Key Contact Roles only controls display; it does not assign the role.
- A form offers the contact roles configured in your account whether staff select an existing organization or type a brand-new one on the same form. A role you set up should still be available while staff create a contact and its organization together.
Assigning or Removing Roles in Bulk
To change roles for many contacts at once, use a mass update or file upload against the Contacts service, not the Contact Roles service. You are changing which role each contact holds, not the role definition itself.
- To add a role, target the contact role field with an add expression, such as
+["ROLE-ID"], using the role's identifier. This has been reported to fail with a validation error at times and has since been reported working. If a plain value is refused because the role field can't be empty, try the add-expression form instead. - To remove a role the same way, use the matching removal expression,
-["ROLE-ID"]. A large batch is not always complete right away, so give it a little time before assuming it did not work. - To clear the Contact Role value entirely for a group of contacts, upload a file with a contact identifier column and a blank Contact Role column, still against the Contacts service.
If contacts still hold a role, Rhythm blocks you from deleting it. Build a contacts query filtered by that role, then mass-update those contacts with the removal expression above to clear the assignments before you try to delete the role again.
Change Impact and How to Revert
- Renaming a role is safe because contacts refer to the role by its identifier. The new name appears everywhere at once, and you can rename it back.
- Deactivating a role stops it from being offered on forms and assigned automatically. Contacts who already have the role keep it, but contact search no longer offers the role as a filter, which makes it harder for staff to find who still holds it.
- Deleting a role is permanent and cannot be undone from Setup.
Warning
You cannot delete a contact role that a contact currently holds or that a rule set still requires. If you try, Rhythm refuses the delete and leaves the role in place. A role's earlier history on a contact who no longer holds it does not block the delete. In an unusual case, a malformed or otherwise invalid role can be undeletable while contacts are still related to it and also unable to be edited or deactivated, failing with an error that the role is locked. That same role may also have no audit history available.
A role named only in an organization type's contact role compliance settings, including its required roles, applicable roles, or roles chosen to receive the compliance email, is not protected the same way. Deleting that role succeeds and leaves those settings pointing to a role that no longer exists. Before you delete a role, check whether any organization type's compliance settings still name it.
If the contact role picker shows no options during a member's first Portal sign-in, even though their organization already exists, this is a known issue in that specific flow rather than something missing from your setup.
Permissions
You need the permission your administrator grants for contact role setup. There is no separate permission for creating, editing, or deleting roles within that setup area.
A role's own permissions setup controls who can assign that role to a contact; that is not controlled here. Any staff member who can create contacts can assign any active role while creating a contact, including an administrative role such as Primary Contact. There is no setting that limits which roles a person with the Create Contacts permission may assign at that point.
If you need to keep the Contact Roles field away from most Portal users while still letting administrators edit it, do not rely on a permission here. Give administrative and non-administrative roles separate default contact forms, and leave the Contact Roles field off the form used by the non-administrative role.
Validation and Errors
If you try to save a role without a name, the form will not let you continue. If you try to delete a role that a contact holds or that a rule set requires, Rhythm refuses the delete and keeps the role in the list.