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Chapter advisors (admin view)

Chapter advisors are the faculty, staff, and alumni who oversee your chapters on campus — faculty advisors, university Greek life liaisons, housing corporation contacts. The platform stores them as contact records, not user accounts: they cannot sign in, do not appear in member directories, and have no platform access. The advisor list exists so chapter leadership knows who to call, and so national and regional admins can report on advisor of record across their chapters.

This page covers advisor management from a national or regional admin perspective. Officers manage the same advisor list for their own chapter — see the officer guide for that view.

What you see​

Advisor management lives on the chapter detail page. From your sidebar: Chapters → [chapter], then the Advisors tab. There is no org-wide advisor roster page in v0.62.1; advisors are scoped to a single chapter and you drill into each chapter individually.

The Advisors tab shows a table of advisor records with the following columns:

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

Above the table, a Show historical toggle reveals inactive (retired) advisors so you can see the full history of who has filled the role over time. By default the table shows only active advisors.

Advisors tab on the chapter detail page with the primary-advisor badge and a couple of retired advisors visible after toggling Show histo... Advisors tab on the chapter detail page with the primary-advisor badge and a couple of retired advisors visible after toggling Show histo...

Step-by-step: add an advisor​

  1. Open the chapter detail page and click the Advisors tab.
  2. Click Add Advisor in the header of the tab.
  3. Fill in the form:
    • First name and last name are required.
    • Email is optional but strongly recommended — you'll reference it when emergency-contact reports go out and when officer transition documentation is built.
    • 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 at the database level, so if you try to mark a second advisor as primary while the existing primary is still active, the save fails with no clear UI message (this is the most common cause of an "advisor wouldn't save" report).

To swap primaries cleanly:

  1. Edit the current primary advisor and uncheck Primary. Save. The previous primary remains active (still listed, still gets advisor notifications) but is no longer the primary.
  2. Edit the new advisor and check Primary. Save.

If you also want to retire the previous primary, set their end date after step 1 (or in the same save). The end-date-based deactivation runs nightly at 1:30 AM and does not free the primary slot until then — which is why step 1 explicitly unchecks Primary rather than relying on the end date alone to clear the constraint.

Inactive primaries do not count against the constraint, so once an advisor is fully retired (after the nightly task runs), the slot is freed regardless of how you got there.

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. As an admin you can edit advisors on any chapter you administer (org-wide for national admins; region-scoped for regional admins).

Step-by-step: retire an advisor​

You have two options:

  • Retire (recommended). Edit the advisor, set an end date (today, or the date they actually stepped down), and uncheck Primary if applicable. Save. The record remains in the system but no longer appears in the default active list.
  • Delete. Hover the advisor row and click the trash icon, then confirm. This permanently removes the record. Use this only for typos and duplicates — for actual former advisors, prefer the retire path so the history is preserved.

Auto-deactivation​

A nightly background job runs every day around 1:30 AM and automatically flips any active advisor whose end date has passed to inactive. If you know an advisor is leaving June 30, set their end date in advance and don't worry about manually retiring them — the system handles it.

This is why "an advisor disappeared overnight" is rarely a bug: the end date you set previously came due and the nightly job retired the record. Toggle Show historical and they'll be in the list.

Bulk advisor import​

There is no bulk advisor import workflow in v0.62.1. Each advisor record is added one at a time through the Advisors tab on the chapter detail page. For orgs migrating from another system with a large existing advisor roster, plan to enter advisors manually after chapters are created.

This is a deliberate scoping decision — most chapters have one to three advisors at any given time, so the marginal value of a bulk path is low. If your org has a strong case for it, raise the request and it can be considered for a future release.

Cross-chapter visibility​

Each chapter's advisor list is scoped to that chapter only. There is no org-wide or region-wide advisor report in v0.62.1. To see all the advisors for your org, drill into each chapter individually.

This is the most common admin friction point: when a national admin wants to email "every chapter's primary advisor," there is no single page to do that from. The workaround is to walk the chapters list and copy primary emails by hand, or have the data pulled via the platform's API.

What officers see that you don't​

Officers see the same Advisors tab for their own chapter with the same edit capabilities — add, edit, retire, delete — as you have. The difference is scope: you can act on any chapter you administer, while officers are restricted to their own.

There is no admin-only feature on the Advisors tab itself. Both tiers see and use the same form and the same constraint. This is intentional — advisor management is operationally chapter-level work, so officers are trusted with full edit rights for their own chapter.

For the officer-specific guidance (use cases, transition planning), see the officer guide for chapter advisor management.

What advisors themselves see​

Nothing. Advisors are contact records, not users. They do not receive notifications from the platform, do not get accounts when added, and cannot log in. If a chapter wants its advisor to actually use the platform — post in forums, view documents, attend events — that's a separate workflow:

  1. Have a national admin grant them a regular user account through the admin invitation flow.
  2. Optionally add them as a member of the chapter (some orgs reserve a special advisor status for that case).
  3. The advisor contact record stays as-is, separate from their user account.

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

Use cases​

A few of the common reasons admins maintain the advisor 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.
  • 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. 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 — standard authenticated admin session is enough.

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. 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 check that they're marked active.
  • 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 and admin 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.
  • You cannot delete an advisor on a chapter outside your region. Regional admins are scoped to their region. National admin assistance is required to act on chapters outside the region.

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; there is no bulk advisor import.
  • 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 or national org expects an org-wide advisor list export. No built-in export exists in v0.62.1; either copy from the tables manually, or have an engineer pull the list via the API.

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