Roles

Members, board, volunteers and staff, with a history you never lose.

What roles are, and where they live

A role says what a person is to your organization, a singing member, someone on the board, a volunteer, a staff member. It is how Fay tells your fifteen insiders apart from the six hundred people who have simply bought a ticket or given a gift.

Not to be confused with anaccess level, which is the other thing Fay could have called a role and deliberately does not. A role describes a strong person | on your roster; an access level describes what a strong login | may open. A board member on your roster may well have no login, and the bookkeeper who has one need not be on the roster.

Roles don’t get a page of their own. Each one lives on a single person, on the Roles tab of their record, and that is the only place you add, end, or correct one. From there a role surfaces in two spots you actually read: as a small badge in the Roles column of the People list, and beside a person’s name on the Household page. So the question “who is this to us?” is answered at a glance, wherever the person appears.

The four kinds of role

Every role is one of four kinds. They share a badge colour because they answer the same question and simply give different answers:

Member: a singer in the choir, or an enrolled member of whatever your organization is.
Board member: sits on the governing board; usually paired with a Title such as “Treasurer” or “Secretary.”
Volunteer: lends a hand without pay: ushering, the bake sale, driving the risers.
Staff: paid by the organization, from the artistic director to a half-time bookkeeper.

What a role records

Behind the badge, every role carries the same short set of fields:

Kind: one of the four above, and the only field every role must have.
Section / voice part: for singers: Soprano I, Alto II, whatever your ensemble calls it. Fay offers the standard parts as suggestions and accepts anything you type, because a barbershop chorus wants Tenor, Lead, Baritone and Bass, and a theater company wants none of them. Once you have used a section it is offered first the next time, which is what stops “Sop 2” and “Soprano II” becoming two halves of one section.
Title: a named position, used for board and staff roles: “Treasurer,” a committee chair, “Artistic Director.”
Started on: the date the role began.
Ended on: the date it finished. Leave it blank and the role reads Active; when you do fill it in, it must fall on or after the start date.

The end date does quiet work elsewhere in the app. When a Member’s role is drawing to a close, Fay raises a “Membership ending soon” renewal prompt on your Cultivation suggestions list, so a lapse becomes a nudge to re-sign rather than a name that silently disappears.

Managing a person’s roles

The Roles tab offers three actions, and knowing which of the last two to reach for is the whole point of the feature:

Add role: starts a new one. Pick the kind, add a section or a Title if either applies, set the start date, and save. A person can hold several roles at once, a member who also volunteers, a board member who is on staff, so adding one never disturbs the others.
End today: sets the Ended-on date to today and keeps the record. The person was a volunteer, and still shows as having been one; the role just stops counting as active.
Remove: a hard delete, for correcting a mistaken entry only. Fay asks first: “Remove this role entry entirely? Use End today to preserve history.”

End today vs. Remove

The difference is worth stating plainly, because the two buttons sit side by side and do opposite things. Ending a role preserves it, the history stays readable, so next season you can still see who sang, who ushered, or who served on the board. Removing a role erases it, as though it were never entered. That is only ever what you want for a typo: the wrong kind, the wrong person, a duplicate added twice.

This mirrors how the rest of Fay behaves. It archives, it doesn’t delete. A role you end is a fact about the past you get to keep; a role you remove is a mistake you get to undo. When in doubt, choose End today.

Maria’s day

It is a quiet Tuesday, and Riverside has just elected a new treasurer: Tom Whitfield, an alto who has sung with the choir for nine seasons. Maria opens Tom’s record and goes to the Roles tab. His Member role is already there, running back nine seasons. She clicks Add role, chooses Board member, types “Treasurer” into the Title, and dates it today.

She saves, and now two roles sit side by side: nine years of singing Alto II and a brand-new seat on the board. Nothing about his membership changed, and his whole history with Riverside reads at a glance.

Later the same morning word comes in that Dale, a faithful usher, is stepping back for the summer. It would be quicker to Remove his Volunteer role, but then in September, rebuilding the volunteer roster, Maria would have no memory that Dale ever helped. So she uses End today instead. His role picks up today’s date, drops off the active list, and waits in the record for the day he comes back. Two clicks, and nothing was lost.