Membership access has two layers. First, staff get one of four ready-made roles so they can open Membership and work on its pages. Second, for each member organization, you choose which contacts can act for that organization. These contacts can join, renew, update the membership record, manage who receives benefits, and, when organization auto-renewal is available, set up automatic renewal.
Prerequisites
- To change a contact's ready-made Membership role, you need access to the place where your Rhythm account manages staff access. This article does not cover that screen.
- To open Setup › Contact Roles and choose which contact roles can act for a member organization, you need the
membership:admin:contact-role-permissions:editpermission. Of the four ready-made roles, only the Membership Administrator role grants it. - Before you can save the Contact Role Permissions grid, Membership's base settings record must already exist. If it does not, the page shows Please update base membership settings before setting up contact role permissions. with a link to Other Settings, and no grid appears. Save Other Settings first, including its business unit and merchant account, then come back.
The Four Ready-Made Roles
Give each staff member the role that matches the work they do:
| Role | What it grants |
|---|---|
| Membership Read Only Access | Staff can view every Membership record and run Membership queries and reports. This role cannot open Setup pages or change records. |
| Membership Day-to-Day User Access | Staff get everything Read Only grants, plus the ability to create, edit, and delete the records they use day to day, such as memberships, applications, chapters, sections, and more. This role cannot open Setup pages or use billing access. |
| Membership Power User Access | Staff get everything Day-to-Day grants, plus billing access. |
| Membership Administrator | Staff get complete control over Membership, including every Setup page. This is the only ready-made role that can open Contact Roles and other configuration pages. |
Tip
If a staff member needs to configure Membership at all, give them Membership Administrator. This includes types, packages, applications, chapters, sections, directories, and the settings described in this article. The other three roles cannot open any Setup page.
Deciding Who Can Act for a Member Organization
Many of your members are organizations, such as companies, schools, or associations of their own. People at a member organization sign in to the Portal as contacts, and each contact can have one or more contact roles there, such as billing contact or mailing contact. In Setup › Contact Roles, you choose which contact roles can act for the organization's membership.
An organization needs at least one linked contact before anyone can act on its behalf. A new organization with no contacts has no one who can start an application for it, so add a contact before you test or offer an application path. When you link a new contact to an organization, that contact is expected to appear with the organization's other contacts anywhere Membership lists them, including after the contact's own organizational affiliation changes.
A separate setting also affects whether the people listed on an organization's membership appear this way and receive the access you grant in this grid. Under Setup › Other Settings, the Other Options section needs to be configured for organizational membership behavior. If it is not, contacts listed on an organization's membership may not appear under that organization's member contacts, and they may not receive the access you grant here. If you change that setting and an existing organization's membership still does not show its member contacts, open the organization's membership record, edit it, save it without making other changes, and allow a little time for the refresh to finish.
Test an Organization's Setup Before You Rely on It
To confirm an organization membership works the way you expect, sign in to the Portal as the organization's primary contact and use Join or Renew there, or ask that contact to do it. If the Portal in your sandbox is not available, you can still validate the process using the membership application page in your sandbox.
Open the Page
- Go to Setup › Contact Roles.
- If Membership's base settings record does not exist yet, save Setup › Other Settings first. Contact Roles shows a message and hides the grid until you do.
- On Contact Roles, you see a grid with one row for every active contact role in your account. The top row applies to every contact of an organization, regardless of their specific role.
The Grid
Each row has a checkbox for each action:
| Action | What it lets a contact do |
|---|---|
| Sign up for membership | Start a join application for the organization |
| Renew membership | Start a renewal or reinstatement application for the organization |
| Manage membership privileges | Choose which people receive the organization's membership benefits |
| Update membership info | Update the organization's membership details in the Portal |
| Set up organization auto-renewal | Set up automatic renewal for the organization's membership, shown only for accounts where this feature is available |
Staff can manage an organization's assigned membership contacts from the Console instead of waiting for the primary contact to do it in the Portal. Open the organization's membership page, choose Organization Options, then Edit Membership, and add or remove assigned members there. The Portal's own list of an organization's assigned member contacts shows up to 2,000 contacts at a time, so an organization with more than that will not see every contact listed.
- Tick the boxes for each contact role you want to grant an action to. The top row grants an action to every contact of every member organization, regardless of their specific role.
- Choose Save Changes.
Result
A success message confirms that the settings were updated, and the grid reloads from what you saved.
Warning
Only active contact roles appear as rows. If you make a contact role inactive, its row disappears the next time anyone opens this page. The next time anyone saves the grid, that role's grants are also dropped from the record. Reactivate the role before it is needed again, then re-grant its actions.
The Organization Auto-Renewal Checkbox on the Top Row Grants Nothing
The organization auto-renewal action appears on the top "every contact" row and on each contact role row. A grant on the top row has no effect for this action because contacts are recognized for organization auto-renewal only through a specific contact role. If you want contacts to set up organization auto-renewal, grant it on the contact roles you actually assign to people, not on the top row.
Only a contact who holds a role granted this action sees the option to set it up. An individual member typically sees a similar action for their own membership, but the rest of an organization's contacts do not see an equivalent self-service option unless their role has been granted it, except during some renewal or invoice flows. When an organization's auto-renewal billing run charges a card, it charges the payment method saved by the contact who originally set up auto-renewal. This stays true even if the organization's primary contact changes later or someone else edits the membership afterward.
Saving Sends Every Membership Setting, Not Only This Grid
When you choose Save Changes on this page, Rhythm saves your whole Membership settings record, not only this grid. If another part of your settings is incomplete, such as your checkout accounts or a chapter officer rule, the save can fail with a message about that other setting even though it does not appear on this page. If that happens, fix the setting named in the message on Other Settings or your chapter settings, then save this grid again.
A Membership's Status and a Contact's Status Are Independent
Setting a membership inactive and setting a contact record inactive are two different actions, and neither one automatically updates the other. To remove member benefits and show the membership itself as inactive, change the membership's status. To remove the person from universal search and stop automated emails and billing notices from reaching them, change the contact record's own status instead. Change both if you want both effects.
Dependencies and Precedence
- The base Membership settings record, including its business unit and merchant account, must exist before you can edit or save this grid.
- A contact whose Rolodex contact role is marked administrative can act for their organization regardless of what this grid grants. The grid does not show or change that access.
- This grid controls only what a contact is offered: the eligible application paths shown to them, and whether the Portal shows links to update their organization's membership or set up its auto-renewal. By itself, it does not stop a request made another way; see the "Sensitive handling" note in Related.
- A membership process can still appear for a record that does not currently match that process's own rules when the record carries organization-level permissions. Removing the record's contact roles removes the option. Treat a process that appears unexpectedly for one specific record as tied to that record's own permissions, not as a setting to change here.
- If a package or process eligibility rule checks a contact's own organization, a contact with no linked organization always fails that rule, regardless of anything else true about the contact.
- Signing a member into an external application through single sign-on only confirms who they are. If that application should also decide access based on whether the contact currently has an active membership, it needs a separate call to the memberships API after sign-in. SSO by itself does not check or enforce membership status.
Change Impact and How to Revert
Every change to this grid applies to every member organization in your account as soon as you save. There is no per-organization override and no confirmation prompt. If you grant an action too broadly, untick the box for that role and save again to take back the grant. If you need to reverse an accidental save, there is no automatic undo. Re-open the page, restore the ticks you intended, and save again.
Permissions
| Task | Permission needed |
|---|---|
| Give a staff member a ready-made Membership role | Access to the place where your Rhythm account manages staff access, outside Membership |
| Open Setup and any of its pages | A role that grants Setup access; of the four ready-made roles, only Membership Administrator does |
| View and edit Contact Role Permissions | membership:admin:contact-role-permissions:edit |
Validation and Errors
| Situation | What you see |
|---|---|
| No Membership settings record exists yet | Please update base membership settings before setting up contact role permissions., with a link to Other Settings. No grid is shown. Because other Membership setup pages and processes depend on this same record, a missing settings record can also make those fail, not only this page. |
| The settings fail to load | You see an Unable to load settings message, and the page stays in its loading state. |
| A save fails (for example, because another part of your settings is incomplete) | You see an Unable to save settings message with the reason. Your ticks stay as you left them so you can correct the problem and try again. |
| A member's Update Membership Info page in the Portal opens with no fields to fill in, even though the contact's role has the action granted | The portal-facing membership page layout has no fields configured, or the wrong page layout screen is selected in Membership settings. Add the fields you want members to see to that page layout, and confirm the correct layout is selected in Membership settings. |
| A save succeeds | You see a Settings updated successfully confirmation, and the grid reloads from what was saved. |