Customize member types

Member types are how GCM categorizes everyone in your database. They drive most reports' filtering, gate which workflows fire, and let your shepherds know at a glance whether a person is a first-time visitor or a long-time leader. Each church sets up their own — there is no fixed list at the platform level.

Open Settings → Reference Data → Member Types.

What member types are used for

Every member profile has a single Member type field. It feeds:

• Member list filters — "show me everyone whose type is Visitor".
• Workflow triggers — workflows can fire on member.type changed to X.
• New-member detection — the new-members module flags people whose type became Member in the last 30 days.
• Charts on the dashboard — the "Congregation breakdown" donut groups by member type.
• Bulk actions — you can promote / demote everyone of one type to another.
• Permissions — leaders and pastors are typically gated by member type combined with their RBAC role.

Because so much hangs on this field, it's worth taking 10 minutes to set up the right list before importing members.

A common starter list

A typical evangelical church uses something like:

Order	Name	Meaning
1	Visitor	Showed up once, contact info captured
2	Regular Attender	Coming weekly but not yet a covenanted member
3	Member	Took the membership class / signed the covenant
4	Volunteer	Member who serves on a ministry team
5	Leader	Runs a small group, ministry, or department
6	Pastor / Staff	Paid or commissioned ministry leader

Yours might add Online Member, Inactive, Transferred Out, Catechumen, Confirmand — whatever ladder makes sense for your tradition. Member types are flat (no parent/child); use Org Structure if you need a hierarchy of categories.

Add a member type

Click Add Member Type in the top right.

1. Name — what shows up everywhere: "Visitor", "Regular Attender", etc. Keep it short — it appears in dropdowns and column headers.
2. Translations (optional) — fill in the Spanish, French, or Portuguese label. See Multilingual labels.
3. Click Save.

The new type appears in member profile dropdowns immediately. No re-deploy, no cache clear.

Order matters in dropdowns

Member types are sorted alphabetically in the dropdown. If you want a specific order — Visitor before Member before Pastor — prefix the names with a number (1. Visitor, 2. Regular Attender) or a letter that gives the order you want. It's a hack, but it works and the prefix shows up in reports too.

Edit a member type

Hover any row and click the pencil icon. You can:

• Rename — every member already assigned to this type sees the new name immediately (the FK is the row's UUID, not the name).
• Change translations — fill in or update the localized labels.

Don't rename to hide a delete

Renaming Visitor to VisitorOld so you can create a fresh Visitor is a footgun. Workflows that filter on the literal name keep matching the renamed row. Use the soft-delete + reassign flow instead.

Delete a member type

Hover the row and click the trash icon. GCM counts how many members are currently assigned and shows you a prompt:

47 members assigned. What should happen to them?

• Unassign them (their member type becomes blank)
• Reassign to Regular Attender
• Reassign to Member
• ...

Pick one and confirm. The row is soft-deleted — it vanishes from dropdowns but lives on in deleted_at. Platform admins can restore it from the data-logs module within 30 days.

If the type has zero members assigned, the dialog skips the reassign step and just confirms the delete.

Member type vs role

Don't confuse member type with RBAC role.

	Member type	Role
Stored on	members.member_type_id	user_roles
Used for	Categorizing the human	Granting permissions in the app
Changes when	Pastor updates the member profile	Admin invites or promotes a user in Users & Roles
Example	Member, Visitor, Leader	org_admin, pastor, treasurer, shepherd

A volunteer might be member type Member with role shepherd. A staff pastor might be Pastor / Staff with role org_admin. They're orthogonal — you set both.

Bulk reassign existing members

Need to retire Catechumen and roll everyone into Member? Two options:

1. Use the delete-and-reassign flow above — set "Reassign to Member". Atomic, undoable.
2. Use Bulk Actions if you want to filter first (e.g. only catechumens who attended ≥ 4 baptism classes). Set member type as the bulk update field and pick the target type.

Permissions

Action	Org admin	Pastor	Shepherd	Member
View list	yes	yes	yes	no
Add / edit / delete	yes	no	no	no
Change a member's type	yes	yes	no (own only)	no

The reference-data page itself is gated by org_admin. Pastors can still change a member's type from inside the member profile.