Departments and delegated admin
Split a growing organization into departments, and let a department admin manage their own members and assign roles without becoming a full workspace admin.
On this page
As a workspace grows, handing everyone who needs to manage a slice of the team full admin access becomes a liability. Departments let a workspace admin split the organization into structural units, for example Field, Comms, and Finance, assign members to them, and delegate bounded administration to a department admin. Manage departments from Settings, then Access, then Departments.
Creating a department
Open Departments and select New department. Give it a name and an optional description. Workspace admins can rename, reorder, or delete departments at any time from this list; deleting a department removes its structure but does not remove the people in it from your organization.
Adding members and promoting a department admin
Open a department to add or remove members. Anyone you add starts as a plain member of the department. To delegate day-to-day management, promote one of them to department admin: only a workspace admin can make this promotion, and it isn't something a department admin can do to someone else.
What a department admin can do
A department admin can manage the plain members of their own department (add, remove) and assign them a role, but only up to a limit you set for that department: the roles this department can assign. Choose which roles are allowed from the department's settings; a department admin can never assign owner or admin through this path; those stay workspace-admin-only regardless of what you allow.
This means you can let your Field department lead add volunteers and promote them to a "Canvass Lead" custom role, without ever handing that lead the ability to see billing, delete the organization, or make someone else an admin.
Who can see what
Workspace admins see every department. A department admin sees only the departments they administer. Everyone else on your team can see the department list, but management controls (create, edit, delete, add/remove members, promote an admin, set the assignable-roles list) only appear for workspace admins and the department's own admin.
Why this matters
Delegation without departments usually means one of two bad outcomes: either every team lead becomes a full workspace admin (more people than necessary can see donor data, change org settings, or remove members), or every role change routes through a small group of already-overloaded admins. Departments let you delegate the day-to-day work — bringing on volunteers, keeping a roster current — to the people closest to it, while keeping a hard ceiling on what they're allowed to hand out. For how roles and permissions work more generally, see Roles and permissions for your team.