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EA User Roles for advocacy — how can I give the access folks need without giving admin privileges?

  • January 26, 2026
  • 4 replies
  • 23 views

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TL;DR: Is there a way to grant our staff the access they need without making them all admins? We use EveryAction and can assign defined user roles — no customization that I know of.

The full context:

The majority of our organization is on the campaign/advocacy side of work and the user roles on that side are pretty limited and seem to not quite meet our needs. 

Most of our campaign staff are set to grassroots user roles. Some of their work includes working with businesses or government entities — contact type: organization — but they seem to be unable to view this contact type, which is really limiting. They also can’t search by online actions, like advocacy forms, even though that’s useful information for them. My workaround for that was to create a list based on form response for them, but when they can’t access contacts on the list, we’re kind of in trouble. 

We changed user roles for one of our campaign staff to digital operations, but she’s reporting she doesn’t have access to phone banking (I need to impersonate and confirm, but the long list at the bottom doesn’t include ‘phone bank/ing’). 

I don’t think it’s a good practice to give everyone admin status, but it’s looking like that’s the only way to achieve the access we need for our team. There seem to be a lot more options on the development side. Is there any hope for us?

Dream roles for our team: 

Grassroots full access

  • Everything grassroots
  • Access to view and edit organization contact type (notes, update contact info, no need for financial view)
  • Access to view online advocacy forms and search online form data (advocacy tools, no need for donation information)

Advocacy full access

  • Everything in digital full access and everything in grassroots

We’re a small organization and I guess not as specialized as the user roles available to us — would these roles or changes to existing roles help others, too?

 

 

4 replies

peter ritcheson
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Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to tailor user roles. They were created to simplify user administration in response to feedback that managing user permissions was an onerous task for most admins. Sorry not to be more of more help.  


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  • First Timer
  • January 28, 2026

Not the answer you’re looking for, but we ran into the same issue as well. Everyone on our team (except for volunteers) has full admin privileges. We find that most of the team doesn’t use half of the features anyway since it’s not relevant to their work, and we have a dedicated staff member who pulls most of our reports and does the “nitty gritty” in EA. 


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  • First Timer
  • January 28, 2026

We have the same problem, and I would strongly support the ability to offer more customization of user permissions. Granting admin privileges to all of our staff users is a pretty significant security risk, but it is really onerous to have to perform simple routine tasks for my colleagues because there are not user roles that match their job functions. 

I see the message from Peter that says the current user roles were created to simplify user administration. I have used systems that have very fine-grained user persmissions, and so I know they can be overwhelming, but it seems like there is a middle ground. There could still be standard preset user permissions, but with the ability to add/remove certain permissions. Or there could be a greater variety of user roles. 


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  • First Timer
  • January 28, 2026

@fbrook Agree! I’d love to see Bonterra take a look at that in 2026.