This article covers the Super Admin role and the Permissions tab. For setting up departments, see Departments: A Detailed Guide.
Roles at a glance
AwardSpring has two admin roles, plus a scoped variant:
Super Admin — the top-level role. Full access to everything your institution has enabled, and the only role that can manage other admins.
Admin — works in the areas a Super Admin grants.
Department Admin — an Admin whose access is limited to their department's scholarships and students. Setup is covered in Departments: A Detailed Guide.
Can they… | Super Admin | Admin |
Work in every area your plan includes | Yes | Only granted areas |
Promote or demote admins (Super Admin ↔ Admin) | Yes | No |
Edit another admin's permissions | Yes | No |
Delete admin accounts | Yes | No |
Delete student, donor, and reviewer accounts | Yes | Yes, with access to the Users page |
Note: Deleting an account permanently removes its data. See FAQs: Users for more on account deletion.
To promote or demote an admin, open their profile and use the Role control — Super Admin (Full Access) or Admin (Limited Access).
Super Admins are marked with a distinct icon in the Users list, so you can identify them at a glance. You can have an unlimited number of Super Admins on your site.
Navigation is role-aware. Each admin sees only the navigation items and tabs they've been granted access to, so two admins at the same institution can see different menus.
How access is layered
Access has two layers that operate top-down: Controls determines which products an admin can work in, and the Permissions tab determines what they can do within them. Configure Controls first — a permission can't be granted in a product the admin doesn't have.
Product access: Controls
Open the admin's profile and find Controls:
Scholarship Management and/or Donor Management — these checkboxes appear only for the products your institution subscribes to. With a single product, there's nothing to choose.
Attaching departments to an admin makes them a Department Admin, and a Department Admin can't hold Donor Management access.
Granular permissions: the Permissions tab
Open any admin or Department Admin's profile and select the Permissions tab. Every admin's access is configured here, organized into collapsible modules.
Only Super Admins (and AwardSpring support staff) can make changes on this tab. Everyone else sees it read-only — or doesn't see it at all, without access to that admin's profile.
Two kinds of controls appear:
Checkboxes turn a whole category on or off.
Radio buttons choose Yes or No, or Edit / Read-only / No access, depending on the permission.
Ten categories are available: Scholarships, Users, Reports, Application, Funds, Tasks, Emails, Texting, Settings, and Help Center. Most are a simple on/off toggle; a few expand into sub-permissions with their own controls. Scholarships, for example, breaks out into Scholarship Qualifications and Additional Requirements (each Edit / Read-only / No access), plus manually applying students to scholarships and sending awards to the Student Information System (SIS) (each Yes / No).
Texting and Webhooks appear only if your institution has those features enabled. More broadly, the modules an admin sees depend on your institution's plan and the products that admin is assigned to.
