Best Practices: Data Security in Organizers Toolbox
PRINTAs an Organizers’ Toolbox Administrator (OTA) you have a lot of responsibility to maintain the integrity of all the data entered and stored in the Toolbox. If you are a Campaign Director or Lead you want to know that the data entered is both accurate and secure. But can you be sure that the data entered is accurate and existing data is secure if everyone in your organization or on a campaign has the same level of access to the database?
At the beginning of a campaign each organization must determine what role each person on the campaign will have in maintaining data in the Toolbox. Some clients don’t want their Organizers and Field Staff to do any data-entry and to leave everything to data-entry personnel while other organizations don’t have the resources for a dedicated data-entry person and thus must rely on Field Staff to perform their own data-entry. Whatever the case for your campaign, in every case you want to make sure that anyone who has access to the Toolbox has the most limited permissions needed in order to perform their job. Limiting users to only those permissions that they need to perform their job limits the potential to inadvertently change data that they shouldn’t be touching anyway.
As an Administrator the first thing you should do is set up projects based on the campaign people will be working on. You’ll notice that when your database is first set up a default project called “All People and Organizations.” This project consists of everyone in the database. A good OTA will create a project based on the structure of a campaign, and then link users working on that campaign to that project. You can create as many projects as you need. Please see the article Project Management in Organizers’ Toolbox and Managing User Access to Projects. For and excellent tutorial and examination of the various levels of users rights, be sure to check out this User Rights video overview from our Administrator Training Series of videos and support articles.
The next step is to review the permissions level of each user of the database. There are 10 different levels of User Rights in Toolbox but I will touch on only the three most commonly used:
- Read only: This means the user can log on to Toolbox and run filters and run reports, run House Visit Packets, etc., but they cannot edit any information in the database. This is the most secure user access level but also the most restrictive. This is recommended only for those campaigns or organizations that have dedicated Data-entry personnel.
- Basic Edit Person: This user level allows field staff (i.e, Organizers) to edit most parts of a worker’s record and thus is appropriate for 90-95% of your users.
- Full Edit: Allows users to do do everything Basic Edit Person allows but adds the rights to create and edit Assessments, Lists, Actions, Elections, and Look-ups (i.e., “Dot Boxes”)
As mentioned above, there are several more User levels that I have not touched on here. For a complete list and description please see support article http://www.nuws.com/support/articles/understanding_user_rights/ where you can download a spreadsheet detailing rights for each role. We’ve come across several unfortunate instances where the OTA has not used proper care in setting up user rights and projects and just give all users Full Edit. This not a recommended practice.
Another not-infrequent practice we have come across is users giving user name and password to other users to log on to the Toolbox. We strongly recommend against this for several reasons:
- Every Toolbox installation allows an OTA to create as many user profiles as necessary for to run a success campaign while securing access to those users requiring access. There is no need to share profiles.
- Sharing user profiles can lead to a potential security breach. If a user who has been sharing a logon ID with a user who remains on the campaign and that user does not reset his or her password, the former employee still has access to potentially sensitive campaign data
- If a user with limited database permissions (i.e, read only) “borrows” a logon ID and password from a users with higher permissions (i.e., Administrator) there is a risk that that user will cause unintentional data loss or corruption.
- One or more users sharing a logon makes investigation of data changes virtually impossible.
One of the best things about Organizers’ Toolbox is that as a distributed database it can be securely accessed anywhere you have an internet connection. This also means that you should take certain basic precautions to ensure the integrity of your campaign data. The guidelines laid out in this article are suggestions and meant to help Campaign Directors and OTAs manage campaign data securely while allowing Field Staff as much flexibility and access as possible while maintaining a high level of security. If you have any questions or would like assistance in setting up projects or reviewing user profiles, please email us at and we will be happy to set up a consultation.