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Managing chapter advisors

Chapter advisors are the faculty and staff who oversee your chapter on campus — your faculty advisor, your university Greek life liaison, your housing corporation contact. The platform stores them as contact records, not as users. Advisors do not have logins, do not appear in your member directory, and do not have access to anything inside the platform. They exist so your chapter has a clean, current record of who to call in an emergency and who national-level reporting can name when asked "who is your advisor of record?"

This page covers how officers add, edit, and retire those contact records. It is officer-and-admin work; regular members do not see the management UI.

What you see​

Advisor records live on the chapter detail page. From your sidebar: Chapters → [your chapter] (or Members → Chapters on some sidebars), then click the Advisors tab.

The tab shows a table of advisors with these columns:

  • Name — first and last, with a Primary badge if this advisor is the chapter's designated primary, and an Inactive badge if they have been retired.
  • Title — free-text field, typically something like Faculty Advisor, Staff Liaison, Housing Corp Treasurer.
  • Department — for university-affiliated advisors, the department they sit in.
  • Contact — email and phone, when available.
  • Term — start and end dates, formatted as a date range. Present if no end date is set.

By default the table shows only active advisors. A toggle in the header — Show historical — adds inactive (retired) advisors so you can see who has filled the role over time.

Chapter detail with the Advisors tab selected and a primary advisor highlighted. Chapter detail with the Advisors tab selected and a primary advisor highlighted.

Step-by-step: add an advisor​

  1. Open the chapter detail page and click the Advisors tab.
  2. Click Add Advisor in the top right of the tab.
  3. Fill in the form:
    • First name and last name are required.
    • Email is optional but strongly recommended — you'll use it when contacting the advisor and when running emergency-contact reports.
    • Phone is optional.
    • Title describes the advisor's role (Faculty Advisor, Staff Liaison, Alumni Advisor, etc.).
    • Department is for university-affiliated advisors (Student Affairs, Greek Life Office, Office of Fraternity & Sorority Life, etc.).
    • Start date and End date define the advisor's term. Both are optional — leaving end date blank means the advisor is current.
    • Primary advisor for this chapter is a checkbox. See "The primary-advisor constraint" below.
    • Notes is a free-text field for context — meeting preferences, specialty area, relevant history.
  4. Click Add Advisor.

The new advisor appears in the table immediately, and is marked Active by default.

The primary-advisor constraint​

Each chapter can have at most one active primary advisor at a time. The platform enforces this with a database constraint, so if you try to mark a second advisor as primary while the existing primary is still active, the save will fail.

To swap primaries:

  1. Edit the current primary advisor and either uncheck Primary, set their end date to today and mark them inactive, or both.
  2. Save.
  3. Then edit the new advisor and check Primary.

Inactive primaries don't count against the constraint, so once an advisor is retired, you can mark a new primary freely.

Step-by-step: edit an advisor​

  1. On the Advisors tab, hover the advisor row and click the pencil icon.
  2. The Edit Advisor dialog opens with the existing values pre-filled.
  3. Change what you need to change. Setting an end date in the past is the typical way to "retire" an advisor without deleting their record.
  4. Click Save Changes.

Edits are immediate. There is no approval workflow for advisor records — officers are trusted to maintain them.

Step-by-step: retire an advisor​

You have two options, depending on whether you want to keep the historical record:

  • Retire (recommended). Edit the advisor, set an end date (today, or the date they actually stepped down), and uncheck Primary if applicable. Save. They remain in the system but no longer appear in the default active list.
  • Delete. Hover the advisor row and click the trash icon. Confirm the delete. This permanently removes the record. Use this only for genuinely erroneous entries (typos, duplicates) — for actual former advisors, prefer the retire path so you keep the history.

The platform also retires advisors automatically when their end date passes. A nightly background job runs every day around 1:30 AM and flips any active advisor whose end date is before today to inactive. If you set an end date in advance — say, knowing your faculty advisor is leaving June 30 — you do not need to remember to manually retire them; the system handles it.

What admins see that you don't​

National admins have the same advisor management UI but can act on advisors for any chapter in the org from the chapter detail page. Regional admins can read and edit advisors for any chapter in their region.

There is no org-level cross-chapter advisor report in v0.62.1 — admins drill into each chapter individually if they want to see advisors.

What advisors themselves see​

Nothing. Advisors are contact records, not users. They do not receive notifications from the platform, do not get accounts when you add them, and cannot log in. If your chapter wants its advisor to actually use the platform (post to forums, view documents, etc.), that is a separate workflow:

  1. Have your national admin grant them a regular User account through the org admin invitation flow.
  2. Optionally add them as a member of the chapter with the role of your choice.
  3. Their advisor contact record stays as-is, separate from their user account.

In practice, most advisors do not need platform access — the advisor contact record is enough.

Use cases​

A few of the common reasons officers maintain this list:

  • Emergency contacts. When something goes wrong (chapter incident, hospital visit, university Greek life office requires immediate notification), the advisor list is the canonical "who do we call." Keep it current.
  • Compliance reporting. Some national organizations require chapters to declare their advisor of record on annual compliance forms. The platform's advisor list is the source of truth for those reports.
  • Faculty oversight requirements. Many universities require fraternities and sororities to have a designated faculty advisor. The Primary flag is how you mark that person on the platform.
  • Historical record. Retiring advisors (rather than deleting them) gives future officer cohorts the institutional knowledge of who has filled the role.

Mobile differences​

The Advisors tab is responsive. On phones the table collapses to a compact view that hides the Department and Contact columns by default — tap any row to expand. The Add/Edit dialog renders full-screen on phones. The Primary checkbox, date pickers, and Notes textarea all behave like standard native inputs. There is no biometric prompt or special permission for advisor management — it's plain officer-or-admin authentication.

Errors and edge cases​

  • The Add or Edit dialog rejects your save without a clear message. Most likely you tried to mark a second active advisor as primary. Either retire the existing primary first, or uncheck Primary on the new one.
  • An advisor "disappeared" overnight. The nightly auto-deactivation job retired them because their end date passed. Toggle Show historical to find them. If they're staying on, edit them, clear the end date (or push it into the future), and re-mark active.
  • You cannot delete an advisor. Confirm you have officer or admin role on this chapter. Other chapter members do not have the delete control. Regular members will see the advisor list but won't see the trash icon.
  • Email validation rejects an apparently-valid address. The email field uses standard validation — check for stray spaces or unusual characters. The platform does not send any mail to the advisor address; it's stored for officer reference only.
  • "Show historical" is on but the list looks the same. Either you have no inactive advisors, or all your advisors are inactive — toggle it off and confirm. The two states are exclusive: active-only by default, all-of-them when the toggle is on.

Troubleshooting​

  • You want a recurring reminder to review advisor records. Set a calendar reminder yourself or build it into your officer transition checklist. The platform does not currently send periodic prompts for advisor updates.
  • You imported chapter data and the advisor list is empty. Advisor contact records are not part of the standard chapter-creation workflow. Add advisors manually after the chapter is provisioned.
  • An advisor changed roles (e.g., went from Staff Liaison to Faculty Advisor). Edit their existing record with the new title — don't add a duplicate. If you want the role history preserved, retire the old record (set an end date) and create a new one.
  • Your university expects to see the advisor in your member roster. They won't — advisors are not members. If your university requires them on a roster, export the advisor list separately (in v0.62.1, no built-in export exists; copy from the table or have your admin pull it via the API).

Last verified against v0.62.1 (2026-05-11).