Rock U - Groups - Group Types

Transcribed Video Content

So let's talk about a very important concept in Rock and that's group types. So as you start setting up your group structures, you're gonna wanna create different types of groups. And so let's just kind of walk through that because it's important that you get this right and it's important that you understand all of your options. And starting at the very basic, in everything in life, when we have certain groups of different types or certain things of different types, we have this innate desire to just group those and organize things. And it's something that was given to us deep down. And we see that too with just even animals or anything in life. We try to classify everything. We try to organize everything, create taxonomies to explain and and to group things. And it's something that we're just born with. And so groups are are no different. Now, there's different types of group structures that you can arrange within, Rock and it's very flexible. The first group type you might do is what we call a fixed group structure. And that basically says that groups of type blue can have children groups of type green and children and group types of green can have children group types of orange. This is very fixed. You'll only ever have three levels and you can have no more. And it's also fixed and very, structured in that blues can have greens and greens can have oranges and that's it. So that is a very fixed group structure. And a lot of times this is exactly what you want for things , small groups. Another option is a very fluid group structure. And so in this case, group types of blue can have greens or oranges and group types of greens can have more greens or oranges. And also the same thing with oranges. Oranges can have more oranges or greens. So with this structure type, hopefully it's evident that this can keep going down because oranges can have oranges and greens can have greens. , in this for example, in this, leg right here, it could just keep going down, oranges and greens forever. So this is a very fluid, structure. And so sometimes you might want this, for maybe specific type of ministry groups where you don't really know how many levels you need. It's almost more a file folder concept within your operating system of how you can keep your files and folders organized. Now, another option is really both of those options. It's a balanced structure. And so you have a little bit of both. So blues can have greens, but they can't have oranges. And greens can have other greens or oranges, but oranges can't have any, child groups. So again, it's it's blending a little bit of both. Okay? So you could have greens going down several different layers, but once you have, oranges, you can't have anything below that. So that's what we maybe call a balanced structure. So there are several built in group types that you should know about and hopefully use it as starting places. Serving teams, a small group section and a small group. So the section are are really kind of that middle green layer that we're looking at and the groups would be the orange layer. Now, general groups are when you just don't need a new group type for something. They're just kind of random groups, that don't deserve their own group structure or group type, but you do need to have a group type whenever you create a group. So this is kind of your catch all group type. The application group is a kind of a system group that we use in the application to just kinda have these sets of people that mean something to the application, but typically you don't use that in your ministry. This next one, security role, is actually a special type of group. And so it has a special meaning to Rock. So Rock says, hey, groups of this type, we're gonna use for security. And as you'll see later, you can actually have a specific group, maybe a serving team also act a security team, but these are specific, this is a specific group type used for a specific purpose. Now, in Rock, wherever two or more gathered, we we call that a group. And so as you can kind of guess, a family is is exactly that. It is a group type. And so while you don't see it in a lot of the group hierarchy in the group tree view because we've hidden it, it really is a group type. Then we have these very specialized group types over here for known relationships and implied relationships. And that's again, Rock's using those as a from a system perspective to group your known relationships and your implied relationships. And the final one is an organizational unit. And so we use this to create a tree a tree view or a org chart within Rock. Now, how you use this is completely up to you. Some churches use it just for that as an org chart. Some churches don't use it at all. Now, those who use it as an org chart, there's really two types of org charts within an organization. There's the official org chart that HR creates and then there's really the unofficial org chart. How does the organization really operate? And so how you use this is kind of up to you. Some use it as a very structured one that show the HR reporting structures. Others use it more as a organizational org chart for showing, , who needs certain rights or who should have be picked in in certain pickers. Okay. So when to create a new group type? This is probably one of the most common questions in the area of groups. And the first point is not often. Don't go crazy creating a ton of group types. If you're an organizer, it feels very natural to go out there and start creating all these group types but you you want to refrain from that. You only want to create a new group type when there's a specific need. So here's some other points to help you. When you identify a series of groups that need different attributes And I would underline the word need. A lot of times, there might be cases where you want different attributes, but this should really be based on need, not want. Also, when you need to separate a series of groups from the rest of your group types. So you'll know in your gut when these groups really are a different type, when they should be separate. And them being separate really helps you sometimes in reporting because it's very easy to say, me all the groups of this type. When the groups have a special meaning to your organization. So that a good example of that is serving teams or small groups. And the final point is when it makes sense and that's really gonna be up to you. I would say that don't feel you have to get this right in the from the very beginning. That's probably, not something that's, easily done. So just go in it with a lot of thinking and a lot of strategy, but just be open to the fact that you might have to be making some changes over time. Okay. So again, we find group types under admin tools, general settings, group types. Okay. So now we're gonna see a listing of all the different system group types. Any any of the ones that you've created since installing Rock. So let's walk through the settings of a group type and maybe pick one that, might be pretty common to us. So, small group. Let's go ahead and select that one. Okay. So again, name description, pretty common. Again, I would document why you created this group type using the description. Your future self will really appreciate that. But under general, we're gonna see that one of the first things we can do is is purpose. And so purpose is just, nothing fancy. It's just a list of defined values. There's a defined type called group type purposes and these help group, group types into a single purpose. And we have a whole video on that. So go ahead and watch that for more information on that. Below that we have child group types. So again, if we go back to what kind of structure are we creating, a fixed structure, a flexible or fluid structure. This is where you're gonna kind of define what what group types are allowed to be under a, small group. Below that is the inherited group type. So, there's a whole video on group type inheritance and we probably, urge you to watch that. But that allows you to inherit certain things about group types attributes. The group capacity rule. So, groups can have capacity and this is gonna determine how should that capacity rule be carried out. So default's none. Then a soft, capacity rule says, hey, we're we'll warn you if you go over that capacity. And then hard is gonna be , nope. Sorry. You you can't add someone to this group because we're at capacity. Below this is a setting of whether groups were required to have a campus. And if yes, it won't let you save it until you pick a campus. Over on the right hand column, we have our location selection modes. So if you watch the group detail video, you'll you'll notice that this makes sense that we're allowed to pick a location based on the group member address, a name's location, or a specific address. We have a whole video on these location types. So go ahead and watch that for more information. Also, can determine whether you're allowed to have multiple locations and whether to enable schedules based on location. Also, you have the ability to have different location types. So you can just go ahead and keep adding location types. And these are just a way of describing what that location means to the group. Don't activate, members. This is a setting so that when you inactivate a person, by default, it's gonna inactivate you and all those different groups. This is kind of an override for that. That basically says, hey, when you inactivate the person, don't inactivate them in this group. Usually, the default you're you're gonna want that to happen. So but this is a little bit of a way to override that. Okay. So that's the general setting. Let's go ahead and close that and move down to attendance and check-in. So this determines whether the group takes attendance. So that'll give you a little check mark on the group detail which allows you to enter that attendance. Whether this whether the groups of this type count as a weekend service. So there's a lot of places in Iraq where we're, trying to determine, how many times in a in a certain month or a certain sixteen week period has someone attended. And this is what really kind of denotes that attendance is counting towards weekend attendance. Sending attendance reminders. This is if you want to start setting up the ability to, email folks and and have your leaders, take attendance for a specific group. This is kind of what drives whether these reminders get sent. Whether group attendance that requires a location. So in certain cases, want that, some cases you don't. And then the group scheduling option. Again, you go back to that video we described, , walking through the group detail in in in detail, you'll notice that we had this simple schedule, which was just the weekly. But you can have a custom schedule. So you that basically it allows you to create these very complex reoccurring schedules for each group. Or you can basically say, hey, what? I've already created those patterns. Use the named ones that I've already created. Below that, we also have whether group attendance requires a schedule. So in some cases you'll want that, others you don't. Now, when you create these schedules, especially the weekly schedule or even some of these others, you might wanna have schedule exclusions. So you might say weekly, but we don't meet in the summer. And this allows you to go into one place and for every group make those exclusions, which is super powerful. On the check-in rule is sometimes when you're checking in, check-in kind of relies on groups. But you don't actually have to be a member of the group to check-in. Okay? So if we have none, it basically says, okay, well I'm gonna I'm gonna mark you as attended into that group but I'm not gonna make you a member. The other option is to add you as a member when you do check-in. So that group will automatically start growing larger and lot larger. And then the final one says, hey, you have to already belong to be able to check into it. So these are some check-in settings, and that'll be covered again under the check-in area. And another check-in configuration is where do you want to print. So there's a a big formula of how to determine where, the printing should happen and that's covered in the documentation. It's and it's, pretty clear when you walk through it in the documentation so I'm not gonna cover it here and it's, a pretty detailed, description. Okay. Now, we move on to roles. So within the group of this type, we want to define what roles can you have. Okay. And so there's a lot of settings to this. So we can create, as many roles as we want, we can put them in the order that we want And then we can determine is this role a leader. So in this case, the the role name is leader, but it could be that we have two different roles that we want to both be considered leaders. So you could have a leader and assistant leader, you want them both to be considered leader. And so Rock has some business logic that looks at those, statuses and allows certain things. You can also determine whether that role should receive, requirements notifications. So if if there's some requirements that aren't met, you can have them be notified of that. These next two fields are for security. And so see our group security video on how these work. But basically, you can allow these roles to have view and edit without having to get into some really granular security. This allows you to make a very simple, security pattern. And then we have, some minimum and maximum required. And that allows you to make sure that every group maybe has a minimum of one leader or maybe even a maximum of one leader. And so the UI will enforce those constraints. Other times, we dump someone into a group and we don't really know, what role to use. So you can also make a default role. So when in doubt, Rock will use that role in adding a person. Moving down, we now have member attributes. So these are all the attributes on the members of groups of this type. Now, interesting enough, you can actually set this on a per group level, but this is gonna set it for every group of this type. And so this is where you define those. Same thing with group attributes. This is where you would define the attributes for the each group of this type and you can even provide default values if if you want. Now group types can have attributes also. This is commonly not used outside of check-in but, it is here if you were to have a use case to need that. Typically though, I have not seen a really a need for that outside of check-in. So for the most part, you can just disregard that that pain. Now here, this is really powerful. You can set different workflows that you wanna launch when things happen to group members. Okay? So you can do this on a per group basis, but you can also do it on the group level, which puts on every group of this type. So, again, you kind of give it a name, a little descriptor of what this thing is doing. Pick the workflow you wanna launch. And then over here, you get to do pick what when this should be triggered. So when a member is added to a group, when a member is removed from a group, when the status is changed within the group, when the roles change within the group, when the member, attended the group or when the member was placed elsewhere. And all of these have a lot of settings. So the status was changed from any to any or you can actually pick from pending to active. And maybe when that happens, you wanna send a special email or something. So these triggers are very powerful and allow you to do some really cool things. So I would come in here to kind of look through these, kind of play with them and and and kind of let your mind wander and be creative of how you might be able to use those. Alright. So, finally, we have display options. So while everything's called a group in Rock, you may not want to call it that, in your use case. So, maybe instead of saying the word group, you want to use the word term, the term team. Instead of the word group member, maybe it's team member. And then every group type can have its own icon. And it's important that you pick a good one here. Okay? Because that's gonna show up in a lot of places, in the tree views, and in other places. So definitely pick a good icon. Go out to Font Awesome, find a good icon for it. Then you have some configuration of where this group where groups of this type will be shown, whether it should be shown in lists of groups, whether it should be shown in navigation. And this last one is actually, do you wanna show the connection status of the group members in the list of group members? So sometimes you really wanna see what their connection status is on that list of group members. Other times you don't. So that allows you to turn that on and off. So that is group types at a high level.