Assigning & changing roles
How an owner or org admin gives a member one or more roles — and changes or removes them — from the Members settings.
A person's role decides what they can see and do in your organisation. When someone joins, takes on a new responsibility, or moves to a different job, you'll want to give them the right role — or adjust the one they have. This is the everyday way you control who can record income, edit the website, approve expenses, view donor details, and so on.
You do all of this from one place: the Members settings. Roles take effect the next time the member reloads, and because WAQAF lets one person hold several roles at once, adjusting access is usually a matter of ticking one more box rather than swapping their whole role.
Who can do this. You need to be an Owner or Org Admin of the organisation. Anyone else opening Members sees each person's roles as plain read-only text, with no way to change them — that's expected, not a fault. If you need a role changed and you're not an owner or admin, ask whoever runs your charity. See Members & roles.
Where to find it. Settings → Members → Active members — each member row carries the role control on its right-hand side.
How roles work here
Before you change anything, two things are worth knowing, because they shape what you'll see on screen:
- Roles are multi-assignable, and they add up. A person can be, say, a Finance Manager and an Auditor at the same time. Their permissions are combined — they can do anything any of their roles allows. The roles never cancel each other out.
- Everyone keeps at least the base Member role. You can't leave a member with no role at all; if you untick everything, WAQAF keeps them as a plain Member so they can still open the workspace.
If you're unsure which role grants what, open the Roles & permissions panel at the top of the Members page — it lists every role with a one-line description — or read the full roles reference.
Assigning or changing a member's roles
Open Members settings
From the dashboard, go to Settings → Members. The Active members tab lists everyone in this organisation, each with their name, email, and current role(s).
Find the person
If the list is long, use the Search by name or email box at the top to narrow it down. Each member's current roles show as small chips on the right of their row — for someone with many roles you'll see the first couple of chips and a + count for the rest.
Open the role picker
Click the role chip button (the one with the small downward chevron) on that person's row. A menu opens listing every role, each with a tickbox and a short description of what it allows.
Tick the roles you want
Tick a role to add it; untick a role to remove it. You can tick several — that's how you give someone more than one role. The menu stays open as you go, so you can adjust the whole set in one pass, then click away to close it.
Done — it saves itself
There's no separate Save button. Each tick saves straight away: you'll see a brief "Updating membership…" message, then "Membership was updated successfully". The member's new access takes effect the next time they reload the dashboard.
Because each tick saves on its own, you don't need to get the whole set right before closing the menu — but do glance at the chips on the row afterwards to confirm the final set is what you intended.
The guards: what you can't do here
WAQAF deliberately fences off the most sensitive changes so that ordinary role-tidying can never become an accidental power grab. None of these are bugs — they're protections.
- You can't grant the Owner role from the picker. Owner appears in the list but its tickbox is greyed out and can't be selected. Ownership is the highest level of access and is handled separately, not bundled into the everyday role menu.
- You can't change an owner's roles here. If a member already holds the Owner role, their entire role control is disabled — you can't add to or remove from it on this page. At least one owner is always required, and the owner's access is protected.
- Approving a join request never grants Owner or Org Admin. When you approve someone's request to join, you can give them a working role, but Owner and Org Admin are off the table in that flow on purpose — promoting someone to run the organisation is a separate, deliberate decision, not something that rides along with letting a newcomer in. See Join requests.
No member ends up with zero roles. If you untick every role, WAQAF doesn't leave the person locked out — it keeps them as a plain Member, which still lets them open the workspace but grants none of the module permissions. To stop someone using the organisation entirely, remove them instead — see Removing members & leaving.
A few practical notes
- Add, don't replace. When a colleague needs one extra ability, it's usually cleaner to add the single role that grants it than to swap their whole role. Permissions combine, so the new role simply adds to what they already had.
- Roles are per organisation. If you belong to more than one organisation, remember a person's role here applies to this organisation only. The same person can hold a different set of roles in another organisation.
- Changing your own role. As an owner or admin you can adjust roles on the Members page, but you can't promote yourself to Owner through the picker, and you can't edit an owner's roles — including your own if you're the owner. These are the same guards described above, working as intended.
See also
Members & roles
Overview of managing the people in your organisation.
Inviting members
Send an invitation and choose the role a new member starts with.
Roles & permissions reference
What each WAQAF role can and can't do, in plain language.
Join requests
Review and approve people asking to join your organisation.