Member database contact roles reference
This reference describes contact roles and how they’re used to classify members and contacts in your database.
Overview
Section titled “Overview”Contact roles are labels that indicate a person’s relationship to your organization — for example, whether they’re a member, a donor, a volunteer, or a board member. A person can hold multiple roles at the same time.
Contact roles are different from admin roles (which control what an admin can do inside MapleGather) and from tags (which are flexible labels you define). Contact roles are stored on each member’s record. The admin member list can’t filter by contact role yet.
How roles are set
Section titled “How roles are set”A record you create with Add a person starts with the Contact role. Changing a member’s contact roles isn’t available yet: the member edit page has no Contact roles section.
Contact roles
Section titled “Contact roles”MapleGather defines a fixed set of four contact roles:
| Role | Typical meaning |
|---|---|
| Member | The contact holds an active or past membership with your organization. |
| Donor | The contact has made one or more donations. |
| Attendee | The contact has attended one or more events. |
| Contact | The contact is tracked in your database but does not hold a membership or donor/attendee classification. |
These four roles are the complete set — they cannot be customized or extended. For org-specific classifications such as “Volunteer,” “Committee: Finance,” or “Board member,” use tags instead. Tags are freely defined by your org and can be used to build email audience segments.
See Create and manage tags and static groups.