Best practices: Managing your team member profiles

Best practices for viewing, adding, and managing your team members (or anyone else who needs to access your account)

Viewing your current team members

All team members are viewable from the Team Members page in your account. You can also choose how the team members and information about them is sorted on the page by clicking on the down arrow next to the column name, as shown here:

Adding new team members to your account

When you need to add new team members to your account, the best way to do this is for one of the active Administrators to follow these instructions and to add the new team member with a unique email address associated with that person only.

NOTE: Once you have added a new team member, it is always possible for an Administrator in your account to change the permissions level, or role, for that team member.

Giving someone temporary access to your account

In cases where you want to give someone temporary access to your account, the best practice is to add the person as a new team member.

Why do we recommended doing this?

One of the most important steps you can take to secure your Little Green Light account is to set up each person who needs to access the system with their own personal login credentials (unique email address specific to that person and password)
LGL never bills you to add new users, and there is no charge when multiple users are logged in at once. If someone is using LGL temporarily, it is even more important for security reasons to add them as a team member. You can then make them inactive whenever you choose, ensuring they will not have access to your database
Since all help requests should start from inside your account on your Help page, the credentials used are those of the person logged in. Our email reply to that question goes to the team member's email address that they used to log in
All changes made in LGL (who updated the gift, who imported the file, who added the constituent, etc.) are tied to the user's credentials

Using the same email address for multiple users

We advise against using a generic email address, such as development@yournonprofit.org. There are many reasons not to do this (included in the bulleted list just above), the most important of which is the security of your data. However, if you feel that this is the right option for your organization, instructions for changing the name of a team member using a generic email address are included at the end of the answer to the question, “Can I use a generic email address, such as volunteer@organization.org, for a team member now and pass it to a different team member later?"

A note about active users and your account's primary contact

Your LGL account checks each night to make sure the primary contact selected is an active user.

The primary contact is selected on the Settings > Subscription settings > Contact information page.

If any team member inactivates this primary contact, a new Administrator who is an active team member will be selected automatically as the new primary contact. At next login, your account will then display a pop-up notification to let you know of this change. This allows LGL the option to contact the primary contact for your account by email when needed.

Frequently asked questions

Please read through the below frequently asked questions and answers, as well as how-to information on adding and removing team members, for answers to the frequently asked questions in the next section of this article.

Q. Will LGL Support change a team member’s name or email address for me?

A. Any team member with login credentials in your account can change their own name and email information without needing to contact LGL Support. To do so, the team member can log in, click the My profile link, and make whatever changes are needed.

However, if the team member is having trouble with any of these changes, they can contact LGL Support.

Q. Can I use a shared/generic email address, such as volunteer@organization.org, for a team member now and pass it to a different team member later?

A. We recommend against using generic role-specific emails. Doing so often leads to minor problems and can cause more serious issues too, including compromising the security of your database. Instead, we recommend setting up each team member with their own email address. There is no limit to the number of team members you can add to your account and no cost for adding them.

Using a unique, valid email address for each team member is a more secure practice because there is no way for a team member who formerly used the email address to log into your account. It also prevents the inconvenience of having to update, inactivate, or reactivate the team member with whom the generic email address was formerly associated.

However, if your organization needs to reuse the same generic email address for more than one user, it is possible to do so by following these steps:

Make sure the user profile is active (hasn't been marked as "Inactive")
If you are currently receiving emails at the generic email address, log into LGL using that email address (resetting the password if needed)
Navigate to the My Profile page and update the name information

Q. A new staff person is taking over a generic email address, which someone else on our team used previously. When I add the new staff person, it automatically identifies her as the past employee. Can you help?

A. The solution in this case is to have the new user log in and then go to the My profile page to update the name of the user.

Q. Can I completely delete a team member’s history so a new team member can be set up with the same email address?

A. We generally recommend against deleting a team member's user profile when they leave your organization because you will lose the history of changes that user made. For more information, please read this article. As for reusing the previous team member's email address, please refer to this information.