How to Use Roles

Your organization has relationships with a lot of different entities! If you are migrating to MonkeyPod it is *REALLY* important that you know what roles you are going to have in your system.

What are relationship roles in my MonkeyPod?

To organize and segment information for relationships of a specific type, MonkeyPod uses roles.

At their core, roles are labels that you assign to different types of relationships, such as Donor, Vendor or Volunteer. A relationship in MonkeyPod can have one role, several roles, or no roles.

The roles applied to a relationship appear at the top of the relationship page. You can also select and unselect roles there.

Screenshot showing relationship roles on an account


How do roles work in my MonkeyPod?

Roles provide a way for your organization to easily segment Email Campaigns and Custom Attributes. They are the foundation of a lot of the system so you want to make sure you take your time when defining them!

For example, roles can be used to:

  • Segment email campaigns
  • Search and browse relationships
  • Add volunteers to Volunteer HQ
  • and more!

How do I add our roles to my MonkeyPod?

To begin, MonkeyPod gives you the commonly used roles of:

  • Customer
  • Donor
  • Employee
  • Vendor

While you can add as many roles as you want, we recommend that you stick to between 5 and 7!

To add a role go to Relationships in the main menu then under Track and Organize you'll see Manage Roles.

Screenshot showing where Manage Roles is

Then, on the Relationship Roles page, click "Add a new role".

Screenshot of MonkeyPod Relationship Roles page, with Add a new role highlighted under the table header ROLE

Type a name for your new role and click the checkmark to save it.

Screenshot showing where to add a new role

What are "relationship cards"?

Relationship cards are summaries of information, or quick data points for a relationship in your MonkeyPod. For example, for this relationship we have the relationship cards Contract Info, Social Media, Documents, Contributions, Purchased, Spending, Invoicing, Contractor, and Pipelines.

This relationship has so many cards because that individual plays a lot of roles in the organization!

To view or modify which relationship cards appear for each role, choose Relationships from the main menu, then under Track & Organize select Manage Roles.

Screenshot showing were to find Manage Roles

Here you'll see a list of the roles you have in the system and their relationship cards. 

Screenshot showing relationship cards

If you would like to configure which relationship cards show up for a particular role, select the Edit role settings button.

From here you can see which relationship cards will be displayed for anyone with that role. Add or remove cards by selecting/unselecting the checkbox.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I assign or remove a role for a group of relationships?

Sure! You'll see the option to add/remove roles to a batch of relationships in a number of places in your MonkeyPod. For example, you can use the Advanced Relationship Search to find a certain subset of your relationships, then use the Assign/Remove A Role button that appears there above the search results to make the desired changes. You'll see that same button in various reports like Top Donors, Top Customers, and donor retention reports.


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