PSA: Security rights for adding non-constituent guests in web view

Rachael Walker

Until yesterday, I was going back and forth with Blackbaud's support for nearly a month trying to figure out why people who had full event and participant rights in both database and web view were not able to add non-constituent guests to a participant's record in web view, while they had no issues doing so in database view. Finally got it escalated to the second level of support, and got an immediate answer, which confirmed my suspicions from the start: in web view, users must have Add constituent rights in their (database) security roles in order to add non-constituent guests. I was told that this is "working as intended' because web view treats these as constituents, even though they are specifically non-constituent records.


Like many shops, we limit add and edit constituent rights to a very few people in order to have good controls on data entry, avoid duplicates, etc. We have many more people than this who need to manage events, and we are not interested in loosening our security rights because of this bizarre quirk. I have made it known that this is unacceptable, and while the rep who called me was understanding, she was not optimistic that this would change anytime soon. We're unfortunately going to have to steer people to database view for event management, because having to push adding guests to those few folks who can add constituents is a non-starter right now.


I wanted to get the word out to other users so that hopefully other people are spared having to spin their wheels trying to figure this out.