A chapter officer’s access in the Portal’s Chapter Center comes from the committee positions they currently hold for that chapter. This article explains how those permissions work, how long access lasts after a position ends, and why officers can update chapter information but never create or delete chapter records.
Permissions Come from Active Positions
Your Rhythm account can be set up to let chapter officers manage certain work in the Chapter Center. Each permission rule names one or more committee positions, such as president or treasurer, and gives specific tasks to anyone who holds one of those positions in a seat tied to that chapter’s committees. If you leave Leadership Position(s): blank, the rule does not apply to every position. It applies to every Portal contact who reaches that chapter’s Chapter Center, whether or not they hold a seat on the chapter’s committees.
Warning
A permission rule with no positions chosen applies to every Portal member who reaches the Chapter Center for that chapter, not only to people who sit on one of its committees. Only leave positions blank when the rule’s tasks should be open to anyone.
A rule can grant any combination of these nine tasks: View Chapter Roster, Update Chapter Details, Update Contact Information, Update Member Records, Sign Up New Members, Renew Existing Members, Change/Update Chapter Officers, Manage Chapter Documents, and Download Saved Queries. Only seats on that chapter’s own committees count for that chapter’s rules. Holding a position on another chapter’s committee, or on a committee with no chapter, does not grant tasks for this chapter. You manage chapter officer administration and permission rules in Membership & Committees › Chapters › Portal Settings. The positions come from Committees, so a chapter needs its own committee with contacts in positions before anyone can qualify for chapter-specific tasks this way.
Manage Chapter Documents does not support bulk actions in the Portal. An officer with this task deletes chapter documents one at a time, not in a batch.
When you add a chapter officer’s position, the available people come from that chapter’s membership roster data. If the roster is incomplete, the officer picker uses that same incomplete data and can leave out people who should be eligible.
Your Rhythm account recalculates an officer’s permissions each time they take an action. When an officer loses a seat, that change applies the next time they do something. The only exception is a Chapter Center page that is already open. That page loaded its task list when the officer opened it, so the list stays the same until the page reloads, even if the officer’s seat ends while they are viewing it.
The Grace Period
A permission rule can include a grace period, which is the number of days an officer keeps that rule’s tasks after their seat officially ends. This gives someone whose term just finished a short handover window instead of removing access immediately. The grace period applies separately to each rule, so an officer whose seat has ended can still qualify for one rule’s tasks through its grace period while no longer qualifying for another rule with no grace period or a shorter one. A seat with no recorded end date is treated as continuing far enough into the future that this calculation effectively never runs out.
Checking What Someone Can Do
If you need to confirm a contact’s Chapter Center permissions for a chapter, staff can look up the permissions Rhythm would grant that contact without signing in as them. Use this to check why someone can or cannot do something before assuming a permission rule is misconfigured.
Why You Can Update a Chapter but Never Create or Delete One
Chapter Center tasks that change a chapter’s own record, such as Update Chapter Details, update the existing chapter. They never create a new chapter or delete the current one. Creating and deleting chapter records is Console work for your association’s staff, and the Portal does not offer either action to a chapter officer, no matter which tasks their permission rules grant.
Opening the Chapter Center
The Chapter Center is a workspace your association places on a Portal page. There is no single fixed menu path to it, only the direct link your Rhythm account’s Portal gives members. When an officer opens the Chapter Center for their chapter, the home page, tasks, and committees they see reflect their active positions and any grace period at that moment. A non-leader, or an officer whose current position does not carry the relevant permission, may be unable to open the chapter link at all. That is expected and does not mean something is broken. If chapter officer administration is switched off for your Rhythm account, the Chapter Center shows only the chapter’s home page and list of committees, with no other tasks available to anyone. The chapter’s name can still look like a clickable link on a member’s own page while officer administration is off, so do not assume that styling by itself means the link leads anywhere.
Related
For how a member’s own chapter choices and dues are decided while they join or renew, see How Chapters Are Suggested, Offered, and Priced While Joining.