Can anyone other than a Platform Manager post an Emergency Bulletin to our website?

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

Our communications folks - quite appropriately - want to be able to add content to the Emergency Bulletin. For instance, last week, we closed for an old-fashion snow day. Today, we were all-remote due to road conditions.


Rather than relying on someone with the Platform Manger role, has anyone figured out how to enable someone with say, the Pushpage role, to post Emergency Bulletins?

Brian Gray

The Platform Manager role has a task named Emergency Bulletin. You can clone the Platform Manager role and enable only that task in the clone, and then assign other users to the role.

Geoffrey Goodfellow

We handle the same as Brian. Cloned role with only that one task enabled, and then assign that additional cloned role to just the users that need to have access. I called ours "Emergency Bulletin Manager"

Lauren Marcus Eisenberg

My instinct was clone the role and permit only that task enable. However, in a recent consulting session, the BB consultant told me that cloned roles are not supported by BB Support and are discouraged! This message is contrary to having previously been encouraged to clone roles. Any wisdom to share?

Brian Gray

Lauren - the use of cloned roles may be discouraged and unsupported by Blackbaud, but there's no other way to divide tasks in the way we want to, in order to reflect the division of authority and responsibility in our school.


I had a long discussion about the entire role structure (and the lack of documentation of those roles and tasks) with Blackbaud several months ago. I was told that they are thinking about how to clean it all up. it's a big job because of the long history of the code.

Janet Wittenberg

Hello all,

To be clear, Blackbaud does provide support in the product for cloned roles. If you have been discouraged from that approach it is because we are aware of some of the pain points of cloning the Platform Manager specifically. Sometimes additional access is granted above and beyond the limited task you are trying enable. Unfortunately to create access to some of the tasks currently enabled only for Platform managers, cloning the role is the only option.

Bryna Gleich

If you clone the platform manager role, just be sure to test it before you give users the cloned role.

"Due to the intricacies of certain manager roles (ex: Platform manager, Page manager, Pushpage (Newsletter) manager, etc.), cloning these roles may not produce the desired effect, as the cloned role may have more access than desired. We recommend testing the cloned role before assigning membership to ensure that security issues are not introduced."

https://webfiles.blackbaud.com/files/support/helpfiles/education/k12/full-help/content/bb-core-clone-roles.html