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Hi everyone, and welcome to this SwiftFox Masterclass. Today we're looking at representative roles which are named roles like a finance or events contact that are each held by a person at an organisation. When your members are organisations, you rarely deal with the organisation as a single entity. You deal with the people inside it, the person who pays the invoices, the person who handles the marketing, or the person who books for events.

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Reaching the right one of them across a whole list of organisations, has usually meant emailing everyone or settling for the organisation's own contact details. In this session, we'll look at how representative roles are set up and assigned, how to find the organisations where one is missing, and how to put them to work in your emails.

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A representative role is a new kind of role in contacts and roles. It behaves like any other role title with one difference. Each organisation can only have one current holder.

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This is a deliberate limitation. An organisation may have several people in its finance team, but a representative role names the one you deal with that keeps your records clean, makes ownership clear, and means SwiftFox always knows exactly who to send to.

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You'll find them in settings under Roles and Titles on the representative tab. Create a role, name it and save it, and the list shows how many organisations are already using it. If a standard role should really work this way, for example a finance contact, you don't need to start again. You can make it representative from the standard tab.

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Where an organisation already has more than one person in that role, SwiftFox stops and asks you to choose who keeps it. For everyone else the role ends today, so it stays in their history rather than disappearing.

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It's important to note that converting is one way. Once a role has been made a representative, it can be renamed or deleted but not turned back. So be sure one person per organisation is what you want.

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Open an organisation and go to its contacts tab. Every representative role with nobody in it appears as its own card with a button to assign it, and every field one is marked representative. A checkbox narrows the tab to representative roles only, so you can see at a glance who is in place. You can assign a role from the organisation or from the person's own profile.

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Contacts and roles works in both directions. Assigning it to someone new, moves it off whoever holds it, and their role is end dated rather than removed. When you choose a role, representative roles are listed apart from standard ones, along with whether each is already assign there. Select it from the list rather than trying to type its name.

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Because each role has at most one holder, it's easy to ask which organisations don't have one. An organisation list can be filtered on representative role, so you can build a list of every organisation without a finance contact and work through it in an action centre. Each representative role is also available as its own column in lists and action centres, so you can see every organisation's finance contact at a glance.

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This is where it pays off when a campaign's recipient list is a list of organisations, the recipient step gains a representative contact section. You choose which roles to include and how the email is sent. The first option, with fallbacks, sends to one contact per organisation. You drag the roles into priority order, and SwiftFox works down that order at each organisation, sending to the first role that has someone in it. If none of them do, the email goes to the organisation's primary contact, which always ends the chain.

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So with the marketing contact first and the finance contacts second, each organisation goes to its marketing contact where there is one, otherwise it's finance contact. Otherwise it will go to its primary contact. The second option, all selected roles, sends to every holder of the roles you've chosen at every organisation on the list, and skips any role that's empty. That suits an update the marketing contact and the finance contact both need to see.

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Either way, it's worth making sure the people you assign have an email address. Representative roles reach your system emails as well. In settings under System Emails and organisations, invoice can go to its primary email, to a representative, or to both with the representative copied in. You can set this differently for each plan.

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So an invoice can go straight to the finance contact. If no one in the row has an email address, it goes to the organisation's primary email instead. Representative roles let you treat an organisation as the people you actually deal with, and reach the right one every time.

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A good first step is to pick the one role your team needs most usually a finance contact. Create or convert it and fill it in at the organisations you deal with the most.

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Thanks for joining this SwiftFox masterclass and we'll see you in the next one.