A contact role describes what a person does for their organization, such as voting delegate, billing contact, or primary contact. You can find people or organizations by contact role in three ways, depending on what you need.
Find Every Contact Who Holds a Role, Across Your Whole Account
Use this search when you need to find every voting delegate, billing contact, or other role across all organizations.
Prerequisites
Your role must include permission to search contacts.
- Go to Contacts.
- In Contact Roles:, choose one or more roles.
- Add any other criteria you want, then choose Search.
Result
The results include every contact who holds at least one role you chose.
Warning
This filter only includes roles that are currently active. If a contact holds a role that was later deactivated, this filter will not find that contact.
See Just the Contacts Holding Certain Roles at One Organization
Use this option when you already know the organization and want to see only certain contacts, such as its billing contacts.
- Open the organization's page.
- Go to the Organization Contacts tab.
- Review the Role(s) column, or use the tab's filter box to narrow the list by role name.
Result
The tab shows all contacts for the organization, along with their roles. If the organization has contact role compliance issues, those issues appear above the table as separate sentences.
Tip
The tab's filter box was reported to miss contacts by role name when the role assignment was imported instead of created directly in the console, and it has also been reported fixed. If a role name search seems to miss an imported role, search or filter by the Role(s) column directly instead.
Whether a contact role appears on an organization's 360 page is controlled separately in Contacts & Organizations › Setup › Types, in that organization type's Key Contact Roles configuration. If a role you expect is missing there, check that it has been added to the type's Key Contact Roles.
Build a Report of Organizations with Their Contacts' Roles
Use a query when you need a downloadable list or saved report instead of a one-time lookup.
- In your query designer, choose a query type built for organizations and their contact roles, or for contacts by role. See Design and Run a Query for how to choose a query type and set criteria.
- Add the role, or roles, you want as criteria, and choose the columns you need, such as the organization's name and the role.
- Run the query.
Result
The query lists organizations with their contacts' roles, or contacts filtered by role, depending on the query type you chose.
When you run an organization query, Rhythm automatically makes each active contact role's name, email address, and phone number available as columns, such as Primary Contact Name and Primary Contact Email Address. To keep the query fast, you can add only a limited number of additional contact fields beyond those defaults. The column picker groups fields by where they come from, such as contact, organization, or parent organization, so you can tell similarly named fields apart. Your account's setup can also expose more contact-related fields for this kind of query, subject to that same limit.
To find organizations that do not have a Primary Contact, or another role, build an organization query and set criteria that return organizations with no contact assigned to that role. Use that approach instead of searching for organizations that do have the role.
Warning
If an organization has more than one contact assigned the same role, such as Primary Contact, a query or export can return multiple names and email addresses for that one organization. Rhythm treats the earliest-created contact as the effective primary contact. If you see this, remove the extra role assignments so each organization has only one contact in that role. If there are many, use a bulk contact-role update.
Warning
Adding an organization email output field to an organization query can currently cause the query to error instead of returning results. If that happens, remove the field or build the report a different way until it is fixed.
To verify why an organization was included in a compliance-related result, add the Contact Role Compliance Status field to the query output. This field shows the stored status behind each row, so you can test whether excluding "Not in Compliance" changes the result set the way you expect.
The # of contacts field is available on organization-type queries, not on contact-type queries. If you do not see it while building a contacts query, switch to an organization query to use it.
Tip
A query that joins an organization to its contacts by role also joins each result to its own parent organization. If you add parent-organization columns to that kind of query, those columns come back empty because the join does not carry parent information in that direction.
Tip
To find contacts who are not linked to any organization, including people who started a profile or membership application without one, run a Contacts › Contacts query and set Organization Name to is blank.
Tip
To find contacts whose organization name is filled in but is not actually linked to an organization record, run a contacts query for records where the organization name field is populated and the organization ID field is blank. This surfaces the affected contacts in bulk so you can correct the link.
Tip
If an event's exhibitor query fields are not returning contact email addresses, or are erroring, you can often get the same information by building a contact-role query from Contacts & Organizations instead and adding email to the output.
If Something Goes Wrong
| What you see | What it means and what to do |
|---|---|
| A contact you know holds a role does not show up in the Contact Roles: search filter | The role may have been deactivated. Search by name instead, or ask an administrator to check the role's status. |
| The Organization Contacts tab is slow to appear for a very large organization | The tab loads all of the organization's contacts before it shows the list, so organizations with many contacts can take longer to load. |
| A role-based query's parent organization columns are always empty | This is expected for a query that joins organizations to their contacts by role. Parent organization information is not carried through that join. |
| A contact's role shows blank on their individual profile page | If the profile callout is configured with the Contact Role ID field, the role can display blank. Switching that callout to the Contact Roles field instead has been reported to fix it. |
| Search or query results still show a role shortly after you removed it in bulk | You can remove contact roles in bulk through a mass update or a file upload using expression syntax. After a bulk removal, search and query results may lag briefly, especially for a large number of records, before they stop showing the removed role. |
| A renamed contact role doesn't show its new name in the criteria for an organization-contacts-by-role query | This has been fixed. Query criteria now reflect a role's current name after you rename it. If you still see the old name, reload your query designer before reporting it as a problem. |