Rock U - Groups - Group Types

Transcribed Video Content

Behind every group sits a group type and this is where the real power lives. Whatever you change here will pass down to every group beneath it. So make sure that you configure it properly. You can change things what a group tracks, what locations and schedules they have, and what group roles people can hold. So let's cover this super important topic. First of all, these are some group types that come out of the box in Rock such as a serving team. We have the small group section and the small group, which you'll probably use both of those. A general group, is kind of a holding group for all the groups that don't need a ton of configuration and don't fall into any other group type. Then application group, that's something you probably won't mess with. Security role, a very special group type that Rock uses to give people security to see certain items. So you won't mess with the group type, but you might end up adding more security roles, of course. Family is a very, very important group type that you'll see used in Rock a lot just to house a group of people who are a family of course. Known relationships, you'll probably see that in the system. Then organizational units are another special group type that Rock will use for things determining the kind of the structure of your organization. Now, when do you create a new group type? Not often. The ones that come out of the box you can use for the majority of use cases, but you would create a new group type when this group type needs its own attributes that other group types don't have. Whether you want a set of groups that stand apart from other group groups and other group types, or if it means something to you. If this kind of group means something different than another group, even if they have pretty similar settings. Then there are three different ways to shape the tree. The tree is sort of just group types, groups, the way that you structure them. Because you might have multiple such as the small group section one you saw earlier. There's fixed group types, you might have a top level group types, then sections, and then you'll have groups under those sections. So every time it's the same depth. Balanced, this will have different depth depending on your needs, such as there might be small groups that need more hierarchy, you have certain kinds of small groups or this might be used for a different kind of group. Then fluid is really a flexible way to approach this where maybe there's a group type up top and it's basically need by need that you determine what groups need what kind of hierarchy or group type structure after that. Now let's look into group types. We'll go to admin tools, up to settings, then search for group types. And we're going to look into one of our very often used ones called small group. And just notice we're in trailblazer mode here, but let's take a look through what we have here. So a name, a description is very important so that people know where this falls in your hierarchy, when they should use this group type as well. You can pick a color to further differentiate and an icon. That's a really nice thing to do to visually separate this group type from others. Then a purpose is something you can use if you have multiple group types that maybe have different setup but a similar idea and you want them to be linked. Then you can pick to it inherit group type attributes from another group. If you wanna have kind of a nice structure, if you have multiple group types that are pulling similar things, configuration from another group type, then you would pick that as the one to inherit from. You can also select whether any child group type can go under this. If you have a fixed hierarchy, you might want to say no here and you can specify the allowed child group types. for example, small group section might only have small group as an allowed child group type. We can also select when groups are added if campus is required to be selected. We can pick to enable a group administrator. You can essentially select a person in Rock that is responsible for this group type. You can enable specific group requirements on the groups rather than just one group requirement for the entire type. You can also select whether meeting style is an option. Then for location and scheduling, you can select all the modes available for selecting a location just an address, a group member address, or a named location. And then the location types that are allowed plus whether multiple locations are allowed for a group or if you want to enable location schedules so that you can have different locations on a schedule. Now this is important group capacity enforcement. You can select whether these groups have no limit, a hard limit, meaning you can never add a number of group members above this capacity or a soft requirement where you'll get an alert when you try to add a group member. Then the group status defined type, this is something you can select to pick what group statuses are available. Then the group member record source. This is important in Rock if you wanna see where people came from essentially, where they were added to the system. And a lot of people will be added through a group, especially small groups for example. And we can pick what that record source is here. We can also select whether groups can individually modify the record source, member attributes, member workflows, and if they can have their own tags even. Then for the system, these are some important things and these are more advanced but we can pick whether when a person is inactivated we preserve their member status, whether we want to enable universal search indexing for groups of this group type so that you can search them, If you want group history tracking to be enabled, whether group sync can be picked on a group meaning that you can sync people into that group using a data view so they're automatically added or removed. Then we can pick whether when a group or when someone is inactivated if there are a list of inactivated or inactivation reasons available And this is when a group is inactivated not a member. And we can, if we select this, pick whether we require that reason. Now display options, this is on the groups themselves. We can pick what we wanna call the group and what we wanna call the members. So we could call them attendees for example instead and we'd have that verbiage, whatever makes sense for your organization. We can pick whether this group is shown in group lists on the group list block, whether you can see them in group navigation such as on the group viewer. Then we can select whether we wanna show the connection status and or the marital status in the group member list for, those people. Now this is super important. Group roles, what roles can people take on? And here you can select which is the default role. Then when you're editing one of these roles, you can give it a description, you can pick what permissions they have, you can even have role attributes to get really specific about this role minimum, maximum, members allowed, and whether this role is public, chat role, and more. Then you definitely wanna pick whether this is designated as a leader role. Type attributes. So any attribute you add here will be something that you configure for the type. Of course, then group attributes, these are things that will be set at the group level such as topic, small group label. These are both things you can select when you add a new group. You can pick whether it's required. Then if you wanna get really specific, you can add group member attributes and that would be something you set on every individual member. We can also select whether group scheduling is enabled. I won't go into this. Note that a lot of these things peer networks, scheduling, RSVP, we have other content on what these settings mean and the importance of them. Peer networks are just a great way to determine whether people in this small group for example are considered close and whether this should contribute to their peer network score, what the strength of that relationship looks and you can get really specific about that relationship scoring. Also, can select whether attendance can be taken and for a small group that's usually something you wanna do. So we have it enabled and we can pick the schedule types that are available. We can even exclude dates across the board for these groups such as a week that groups won't be able to meet or if they don't meet over the summer for example, you could exclude those dates. Then you can pick whether the attendance counts towards the weekend service and more. But again, this is covered in other content that we have. And we can also select whether RSVP is enabled for this group, another powerful way for people to let if they're coming or not. Group requirements, this is something that we can set on the group type. You probably also remember at the start we have an option to enable specific group requirements so every group can have their own. But if we wanna set it at the type something people need to have a background check to join for example, you can add that here. Then group member workflows, this is a great thing where you can select a workflow such as a photo request and you can have a trigger event. There's lots of options member being added to or removed from a group or their status changing. And then we can get really specific about when this triggers and we can launch a workflow. And that's it on group types. So it might feel overwhelming there's a lot of different things to set up, but really take it one at a time. These start to feel understandable and simple as you look into group types and create your own. Group types are the blueprint. If you set these up thoughtfully, then every group beneath it will behave just the way that your organization expects.