Departments

Departments are the structural units of your organization: Field, Communications, Finance, or whatever shape your work takes. They let you group members, hand day-to-day management of each group to a department admin, and bound what those admins can do — all without giving anyone workspace-wide admin access.

You'll find them in your workspace under Access → Departments.

A new organization can start with departments already in place: the creation flow's Structure step proposes a set from a template you choose (a union local, an advocacy group, a campaign headquarters, and so on) and lets you rename, remove, or add them before anything is created. See Creating your organization. Everything below applies to those departments exactly as it does to ones you add later.

Creating and managing departments

Workspace owners and admins (or a custom role with the Create, edit, and delete departments permission) manage the department structure from the Departments page:

• Create a department by typing a name in the New department card.
• Rename a department or edit its description from the row menu (⋯ → Edit). The description appears next to the name in the list and as the subtitle inside the department.
• Reorder departments with the up and down arrows on each row. The order you set here is the order everyone sees.
• Delete a department from the row menu (⋯ → Delete). Members of the department stay in your organization and keep their org roles — they just lose the department membership. Teams that belonged to the department become workspace-level teams. Deleting cannot be undone.

Click anywhere on a department's row to open it.

Applying a template

Workspace owners and admins can add a whole set of departments at once with Apply a template on the Departments page. Pick one of the starting-structure templates (a union local, an advocacy group, a community organization, a nonprofit or coalition, a cooperative, a student organization, or, for campaigns, a campaign headquarters or an issue campaign), then keep or untick each department it proposes. Departments you already have are shown as Already exists and are never duplicated.

Tick Also add this template's custom roles to create the template's roles at the same time; they appear under Access, then Roles, where their permissions can be fine-tuned. Everything a template adds can be renamed, reordered, or deleted afterwards exactly like any other department or role.

Templates also set which roles each new department's admins can assign (see Roles a department can assign below). For example, a union local's Organizing department can assign Organizer. Each department in the dialog says which roles its admins will be able to assign, counting roles you are adding now and roles you already have. Departments you already have keep the roles they can assign; a template never changes them. The same dialog is on the Roles page, where roles come first and departments are optional.

Adding and removing members

Inside a department, use Add member... to search your active org members by name or email address and add them with a click. Anyone already in the department won't appear in the search. Remove a member with the Remove button on their row; removal only affects the department, never their org membership.

Members can belong to any number of departments.

Department admins

A department admin manages their own department without needing any workspace-level role. To appoint one, open the department as a workspace admin and click Make admin on a member's row (demote with Make member).

Department admins can:

• Add plain members to their department and remove them
• Assign org roles to their department's members, within the department's allowed set (see below)

They cannot promote or demote other department admins, change the department's name or structure, or touch other departments. Members who administer at least one department see those departments listed under Access → Departments even without any broader permission.

Roles a department can assign

Each department has an allowed set of org roles — a ceiling on what its admins can hand out. Workspace admins configure it in the Roles this department can assign card inside the department. Departments created from a template start with the template's choice already set, and you can change it here at any time.

The rules:

• Member is the floor: department admins can always set someone back to plain member.
• Custom roles appear in the picker only if you check them into the department's allowed set.
• Owner and admin can never be delegated, and a department admin can never change someone who is currently an owner or admin.
• A department admin can't change a member whose current role was granted from outside the department's allowed set, and can't change their own role.

This makes delegation safe by construction: a Field department whose allowed set contains only the "Field Coordinator" custom role can promote its members to Field Coordinator and back to member — nothing else.

Who can do what

The custom-role permissions above live under the Access group when you edit a role.

All department changes — structure edits, membership changes, admin appointments, and role assignments — are recorded in your organization's audit log.