Roles and Permissions
Access to Outreach is decided by the platform role held on an organisation membership. Five roles are relevant: Org Admin, Admin, Campaign Manager, Campaigner and Operations.
The canonical definition of each role, the role hierarchy, invite rules and last-Org-Admin protections are documented once, in the platform docs: NeonNow Roles and Permissions. This page describes what each role can do within Outreach.
Which Roles Can Use Outreach
| Role | Sees Outreach? | Summary within Outreach |
|---|---|---|
| Org Admin | Yes | Everything an Admin can do, plus Outreach Settings: product access, channel credentials, SMS senders, domains and email senders |
| Admin | Yes | Everything a Campaign Manager can do, plus administering users and their roles |
| Campaign Manager | Yes | Everything a Campaigner can do, plus managing contacts, fields, segments, templates and brands |
| Campaigner | Yes | Campaigns only: create, edit, run and monitor them |
| Operations | No | Outreach is not visible in the sidebar |
What Each Role Sees
The shape of the product changes with the role, so two people can be looking at the same organisation and see very different navigation.
- Campaign Manager, Admin and Org Admin see sub navigation across Campaigns, Contacts, Fields, Templates and Brands, and move between the library sections freely. Settings sits alongside them and opens for an Org Admin only.
- A Campaigner sees Campaigns and no sub navigation. Everything a Campaigner needs is reached from a campaign, including segments, saved templates and brands, which are selected inside the campaign rather than managed in a library.
- Operations sees no Outreach entry at all.
Campaigner
The Campaigner role is for the person who builds and sends campaigns using material someone else maintains.
A Campaigner can:
- Create, edit and delete campaigns
- Choose a campaign audience, including an existing segment or an uploaded contact file
- Open a run's audience page to see the contacts behind that run
- Trigger a segment refresh from the campaign or the run
- Apply a saved template to a campaign, or build a template in the campaign instead
- View brands and apply one to a template they build in a campaign
- Create, start, stop and cancel runs, and duplicate a past run
- Send test messages
- Monitor a run, retry failed messages and export results
A Campaigner cannot manage contacts, contact fields, segments, saved templates, brands or settings. A saved template applied to a campaign is read only, and a brand is applied rather than edited. Anything that needs to be created or changed in one of those libraries has to come from a Campaign Manager or an administrator.
Two distinctions are worth drawing out, because the Campaigner boundary is narrower than it looks:
- Segments. A Campaigner cannot build, edit, duplicate or delete a segment, and cannot open the segment page, which lives in Contacts. Refreshing a segment is not restricted, and a Campaigner reaches it from the audience summary on a campaign or a run.
- Brands. A Campaigner can see the brands available and apply one to a template they build in a campaign. Creating, editing, duplicating and deleting brands belongs to a Campaign Manager or above.
What Campaigners See Before Outreach Is Enabled
Where Outreach is not yet active for the organisation, a Campaigner sees a landing page asking them to contact their Org Admin. Only an Org Admin can request access.
Campaign Manager
Campaign Manager covers everything a Campaigner can do, and adds ownership of the material campaigns draw on:
- Contacts: add contacts manually, upload them in bulk, edit, export and delete them
- Segments: build, edit, duplicate and delete segments, and open the segment page to review who matches
- Fields: add and delete custom fields
- Templates: create, edit, duplicate and delete templates in the library
- Brands: create, edit, duplicate and delete brands
This is the role to give the person who curates the contact store and the shared content, so campaigners can be pointed at a segment and a template rather than assembling their own each time.
A custom field is named and typed when it is created, and no role can change either afterwards. Correcting a name or a type means deleting the field and adding a replacement. See Deleting a Custom Field for what that removes.
Admin
Within Outreach, an Admin has the same permissions as a Campaign Manager. The difference sits outside the product: an Admin also administers the organisation's users, including inviting people and assigning roles.
An Admin cannot open Outreach Settings. Credentials, the SMS sender strategy, domains and email senders are all Org Admin territory, so an Admin who needs a channel changed asks an Org Admin.
Org Admin
Org Admin is Admin plus Settings. On top of everything above, an Org Admin:
- Requests and cancels Outreach access for the organisation
- Configures the SMS channel, including the Twilio Account SID, Auth Token and Messaging Service SID
- Chooses the SMS sender strategy and curates the senders campaigns may use
- Configures the email channel with a SendGrid API key
- Adds, verifies and removes sending domains and sender addresses
Until at least one channel is configured, nobody can run a campaign, which makes this the first role to involve in a new organisation.
Operations
The Operations role is for CX contact centre work. Outreach is not visible in the sidebar for an Operations user, and they have no access to its pages, campaigns or settings. Someone who needs both jobs needs a second membership or a different role.
Capability Summary
Operations is left out of the table below, because the answer is no on every line.
| Capability | Campaigner | Campaign Manager | Admin | Org Admin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| See Outreach in the sidebar | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| See the Contacts, Fields, Templates and Brands sub navigation | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Create, edit and delete campaigns | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Choose an audience, including a segment | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Open a run's audience page | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Trigger a segment refresh | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Apply a saved template, or build one in the campaign | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| View brands and apply one to a template built in a campaign | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Create, start, stop and duplicate runs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Send test messages | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Monitor runs, retry messages and export results | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Add, edit, export and delete contacts | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Open the segment page in Contacts | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Build, edit, duplicate and delete segments | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Add and delete custom fields | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Create and manage templates in the library | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Create, edit, duplicate and delete brands | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Invite users and assign roles | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Open Outreach Settings | No | No | No | Yes |
| Request or cancel Outreach access | No | No | No | Yes |
| Configure the SMS and email channels | No | No | No | Yes |
| Manage SMS senders, domains and email senders | No | No | No | Yes |
Inviting users, assigning roles and changing organisation-level settings happen in the NeonNow Admin app rather than in Outreach. See User Management and Organisation Settings.
Related Guidance
- NeonNow Roles and Permissions. Canonical role definitions and rules
- Getting Started. What each role does to get an organisation sending
- Settings. What an Org Admin configures
- Campaigns Overview. The campaign lifecycle and the actions on it