Core Docs - Engagement - Intro to the Group Finder

Rock Version: v21.0
Last Modified: 2026-09-11 9:14 AM

Getting people placed is one of the hardest jobs in ministry. Somebody is ready to take a next step, and the group that fits them already exists in Rock. They just cannot see it. The Group Finder closes that gap. It gives people a page where they can sort through your groups on their own terms and land in the right one.

Point it at one group type or at several at once. Small groups, serving teams, classes, neighborhood groups, support groups. A person narrows the list by campus, location, by the nights they are free, by what they are looking for, then signs up. Go from curious to connected without a single call to the office.

Add the Group Finder block to a page and it looks like it belongs there. The filter bar, cards and map pick up your site's own type and color, so there is no theme work to do first. Choose the group types it offers, and you have a working page. We suggest your main connection page on the external site, where people already go looking for a next step.

Public Groups
Only groups marked as Public appear in the Group Finder. Change that setting by editing the group.

What visitors see

A filter bar sits across the top of the page, and matching groups appear below it as cards. Results update as filters change, so nobody has to select Search and wait.

Each result card carries the group name, its schedule, its description and its campus, plus any extras you turn on: a photo, the average age of members, a few group attributes, and depending on your Distance Calculation setting, how far the group is from the visitor and how long the drive takes.

Campus - Narrows results to one campus.

Where - Chooses a meeting style of In-Person, Online or Hybrid. Depending on the Distance Calculation setting, this is also where a visitor selects Use Current Location or types an address to find groups near them.

When - Picks the day of the week and the time of day a group meets.

What - Searches group names as the visitor types and offers your most useful group attributes, such as Topic, as pills right in the bar.

More Filters - Holds the rest of your attribute filters in a modal, keeping the main bar short.

From card to signed up

Selecting Register on a card sends the visitor to the page set in the Register Page block setting, carrying that group along with it. Point that setting at a page running the Group Registration block, which collects contact details and adds the person to the group.

The setup notice only you can see

A yellow notice appears at the top of the block when a setting is out of step, and only people with administrative access see it. A fresh block shows nothing, and each line clears itself once you fix the item. Three can appear.

The map is hidden - Show Map is on but the browser-side Google API Key is not set. The finder still works, it just falls back to cards only.

Address search is unavailable - A Distance Calculation mode is asking visitors for an address, but the Google API Key Server is not set. The default mode uses the browser's own location and needs no key. See Creating a Server-Side Key.

The Campus filter has no campuses - The filter is showing but no campus qualifies, usually because Campus Types or Campus Statuses narrowed the list to nothing. Add an active campus, widen those two settings, or hide the filter.

One more can reach visitors. A finder with no group types selected has nothing to search, so a visitor is told groups are not available right now while you are told which setting to fix.

Block Settings

To open these settings, select the ti ti-edit icon on the Group Finder block. The settings are grouped into the sections that follow.

Group Types

Group Types - Start here. The group types you pick decide which groups the finder offers, and every attribute in the filter and card settings that follow is drawn from them. Small Group is selected by default. Point it at your serving team types instead to build a "where can I serve" page. See Group Types.

Filters

Campus

Hide Campus Filter - Removes the campus picker. Off by default. Worth turning on for a single-campus organization, or on a page that already carries campus context.

Campus Types - Limits the picker to certain campus types. Physical is selected by default, which keeps an Online campus out of a list of places to drive to. See Campuses.

Campus Statuses - Does the same for status. Open is selected by default, so a campus that has not launched stays out of the list.

Where

Supported Meeting Styles - Offers In-Person, Online and Hybrid as choices. Only In-Person is selected by default. Select none and the Meeting Style filter hides itself, which is the right move when every group meets the same way. Meeting style has to be set on the groups themselves before this filter can sort anything, so enable it on your group types first.

Distance Calculation - How the finder handles a visitor's location and the distance shown on each card. Each option builds on the one above it, and each one costs a little more to run. Default is Straight-Line Distance (My Current Location). Rock checks each option against your Google configuration when you open these settings and disables any it cannot support, and if a service stops working later the finder falls back to the option above rather than failing. See Creating a Server-Side Key.

Keeping the bill down
Rock works to stay inside those free allowances. Google measures only the 12 groups on the page a visitor is looking at, sorting and straight-line distance are worked out inside Rock without calling Google at all, and paging runs on straight-line distance so turning pages does not re-measure groups already seen. Rock also asks Google for only the fields it needs, which keeps these requests in Google's least expensive tier. Past the allowance the finder quietly stops showing times instead of showing visitors an error, and writes a warning to [[Rock Logs]]. For current rates, see What Each Google Service Costs.

When

Display Day of Week Filter - Lets people pick the nights they are free. On by default, and works with weekly schedules.

Display Time of Day Filter - Off by default. Pairs well with day of week, since somebody who works days can then go straight to evening groups.

What

Live Text Search - Filters by group name as the visitor types. On by default, which pays off when your group names carry real meaning, such as Young Marrieds or Men's Breakfast.

Featured Attributes - Promotes your best attributes into the filter bar as pills, so Topic sits next to Campus instead of hiding behind More Filters. Single-select, multi-select and boolean attributes are eligible, and an attribute cannot be both featured here and listed under More Filters.

More Filters

Display Attribute Filters - Holds every other attribute worth filtering by inside the More Filters modal. Nothing is selected by default. Keep two or three attributes featured in the bar and put the long tail here. An attribute cannot be listed here and featured at the same time.

Card and Map

Card

Show Image - Adds the group's photo to the top of each card. Off by default. Photos do more than any other setting to make a group feel real, so add images to your groups and switch this on. A group with no photo shows a patterned placeholder. The image lives on the group itself as a field rather than an attribute, so you set it while editing the group. See Edit a Group.

Show Average Age - Displays the average age of current members. Off by default. It quietly answers the question everybody is asking: will I fit here?

Show Attribute on Card - Chooses which group attributes appear on the card, each with its icon and value. Two or three keeps the card readable.

Group Card Template - The Lava behind each card. Leave the default alone until it stops being enough. Available merge fields include Group, GroupTypeName, GroupTypeColor, ShowImage, ImageUrl, ScheduleText, CampusName, AverageAge, StraightLineDistance, DrivingDistance, DrivingMinutes and DriveTime. Clear the field to reset to the built-in default. See the Lava documentation.

Map

Show Map - Switches the layout to cards beside a live map. Off by default. Cards and map are linked, so selecting a card highlights its marker and selecting a marker highlights its card, and a ti ti-search Search this area action re-runs the search against whatever the map is currently showing. Pair it with a Distance Calculation mode and a visitor can see at a glance which groups are a short drive away.

Group Marker Color - Sets the color of the group markers. Defaults to #2B7FFF. This one color drives every marker state through opacity, giving a solid border and light fill when a marker is hovered or selected and a lighter version otherwise, so there is no separate hover color to set.

Current Location Marker Color - Sets the color of the you-are-here marker, the visitor's current location or the address they entered. Defaults to #EF4444. Keep it clearly different from the group markers.

Map Style - Matches the map to your site's look. Leave it unset to use the block's default style. See Google Map Styles.

Locations stay approximate, for privacy
Most groups meet in somebody's home, so the map never shows the real address. Each marker is shifted a few hundred feet and drawn as a circle, so a visitor sees the neighborhood and not the front door. Rock recalculates that offset every time rather than storing it, and it lands in the same spot on every visit.

Linked Pages

Register Page - The page a visitor is sent to when signing up for a group. Set this before you launch, or the Register button has nowhere to go.

Build more than one finder

The finder is only as narrow as the group types you feed it. A few worth standing up:

A serving team finder - Point Group Types at your serving team types and feature a Ministry Area attribute. Now "where can I serve" is a page, not an email to the office.

A groups near me page - Turn on Show Map and set Distance Calculation to a mode that asks for a location, so somebody new to town sees the four groups within a couple of miles of their house.

A class catalog - Feature Topic and turn on Live Text Search so a person hunting for a marriage class finds it by typing a few letters.

Group Finder (Legacy)

The previous Group Finder block is still in Rock, renamed Group Finder (Legacy). It ships configured on the external website under Connect > Small Groups, and if it is already running on a page it keeps working, so there is no rush to move. Everything above describes the new block; this section covers the legacy one.

The legacy block searches on filters the visitor sets and then shows results in a grid, a map, or both, rather than the card layout. A visitor picks their criteria and selects Search to see matches, instead of results updating as they choose. Only groups marked Public appear, the same as the new block.

Legacy Block Settings

To open these settings, select the ti ti-edit icon on the Group Finder (Legacy) block. The settings that follow are grouped by what they control.

Which Groups Appear

Group Type - Start by choosing the group types you want available through the finder.

Hide Overcapacity Groups - Keeps a group out of the results once it has reached or passed its capacity, so nobody signs up for a group that is already full.

Load Results on Initial Page Load - Shows the groups and map straight away, before anybody searches. Turn it off and a visitor has to search first, which only makes sense when you have filters for them to search on.

Location Types - Shows only groups that have a location of the type you pick, such as Meeting Location. You can set a different location type for each group type.

What A Visitor Can Filter By

Display Day of Week Filter and Display Time of Day Filter - Offer the day and the time a group meets, for groups on a weekly schedule. Time of day works in ranges, so somebody can ask for groups meeting after 5:00pm.

Display Campus Filter and Enable Campus Context - The first lets a visitor filter by campus. The second skips the asking and filters to the page's campus context automatically.

Campus Type and Campus Status - Narrow which campuses are offered, so you can list only Physical campuses that are Open.

Display Attribute Filters - Chooses which group attributes a visitor can filter by. The attribute has to exist on every group type you selected, or it cannot be used as a filter.

Geofence Group Type - Limits results to the neighborhood a visitor lives in, which is the legacy block's signature feature. Create a group type to hold your neighborhoods, add each neighborhood as a group of that type, then select it here. The finder asks for the visitor's address, works out which neighborhood they fall inside, and shows only groups meeting in that area.

The Map

Show Map - Shows or hides the map of matching groups, and lets you set the Map Style and Map Height.

Map Marker - Sets the Marker Color and the marker shape, choosing from Pin, Marker, Marker With Dot, or Circle.

Minimum, Maximum and Initial Zoom Level - Control how far a visitor can zoom and where the map starts. Setting a maximum keeps somebody from zooming all the way to a single house, and something like 10 - City makes a sensible starting view.

Location Precision Level and Marker Auto Scale Zoom Level - Blur a group's exact spot, which matters when it meets in somebody's home. Precision offers Precise, Narrow, Close and Wide, deciding how exact a coordinate reaches the map. Auto Scale keeps the marker at a wider level than the visitor has zoomed to, so the pin never resolves to a single building.

Group Window Contents - The HTML and Lava for the pop-up that opens when a visitor selects a group on the map. By default it shows the group name, location, attributes, and links to the detail and register pages when those are set.

Results and Linked Pages

Show Grid - Displays matching groups as a table. With it on you also choose which columns appear, including schedule, description, member count, average age, campus, and distance from the visitor's address, whether results sort by distance, how many groups per page, and which group attributes to include.

Lava: Show Formatted Output - Renders the results however you like instead of, or above, the grid. Your template gets a Groups array to loop through. See the Lava documentation.

Group Detail Page and Register Page - Where a visitor goes to read more about a group and where they go to sign up. Both are available to your Lava as LinkedPages.GroupDetailPage and LinkedPages.RegisterPage.