> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.broadstripes.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# User roles and permissions

## Overview

Before you invite a new organizer or change permissions granted to an existing organizer, you'll want to understand the difference between each of Broadstripes' user roles.

This article gives an in-depth look at Broadstripes' three user roles including exactly what they are allowed to see and do within the project.

* Basic Users
* Project Admins

Once you've decided what kind of role a user will play, you can visit the [user and membership overview](/docs/start-project/user-and-membership-overview) for videos and step-by-step instructions on adding users and assigning or editing user permissions.

## User roles

### Basic user

A **basic user** is a member of a particular project with all the necessary permissions to work with the data in that project. They can:

* Create, edit, and delete contact records for people and organizations (i.e. shops and departments).
* Create, edit, and delete events.
* Create and save searches and layouts (personal or shared).
* Create and save lists (personal or shared)

In addition, a project admin can grant a basic user any of the following **optional per-user permissions** when inviting them or by editing their membership later:

* **Download CSV / XLSX files** — export search results as spreadsheets.
* **Merge contacts** — combine duplicate contact records.
* **Manage public forms** — create, edit, and configure public forms.
* **Perform data imports** — import spreadsheets of contact data into the project.

If a basic user does not have one of these permissions, the corresponding feature is not available to them in their project.

### Project admin

A **project admin** has all the capabilities a basic user does. In addition, they can:

* Invite new users, promote existing users to admin, and deactivate existing user memberships from the project.
* Create, update, and delete all project data such as:
  * Custom fields
  * Assessments (aka codes)
  * Leader roles
  * External systems
  * User groups
  * Status reports
  * Calculated columns
  * Contact types
* Import data via spreadsheet.
* Import shape files.

Admins may have other capabilities as well, as determined by the configuration of your project. For example, if a project has SMS (i.e. text) messaging features enabled, admins will have the ability to provision SMS numbers for users.

Note that a user may be an admin in one project and a basic user in another.