Question

Photo of Matt Whitsell

1

What does your Group Tree look like?

5

We are about to start setting up our groups into the Rock and we really want to get it right the first time...  Would you be willing to share how you set up your groups?  What does your group tree look like? Could you share an image and give a strength or weakness to the setup?

 

Thanks

Groups
  • Photo of Frank Grand

    1

    Hey Matt,

    Not sure your setup, but we are a multi-site church that currently has 4 services on Sunday at most locations.  We currently have our volunteer groups set up like this:

    Capture.JPG

    This ties directly to how we want check-in to function.  So each of our ministry areas will have two types of volunteer groups.  Our "attendee" groups will have no restrictions on check-in, and our volunteer groups will require group membership to check in.  To function better with reporting and ease of administration, we have one group for all our campuses.  So in the above picture, we have only one Campus Safety group for all 19 of our campuses.  We differentiate the campuses by using a group member attribute.  The potential downside to this is that when staff are managing their group rosters, they have to make sure to filter for their campus only.

    Hope this helps a bit, let me know if you have other questions.

     

  • Photo of Bronson Witting

    2

    Hey Matt, I would suggest building out seperate Group Viewer pages for each type of group you'll be building (Volunteer Teams, Adult Small Groups, whatever else) - see http://www.rockrms.com/Rock/BookContent/7/47#groupstrategies.  If we just had staff and volunteers look at the standard Group Viewer will all groups, it's a mess - but with seperate group viewers people can see the group types they need to see based on security roles and there has been much less confusion.  We just link to them from the People menu (since I'm in the Admin group I can see them all):

    2015-09-28 08_39_22-Start.png

     

    Unlike Frank, we have a top level group for each Campus.  I like Frank's group attribute setup a ton, but I think that would be too much for our staff at this point.  Here's what our tree looks like:

    2015-09-28 08_42_27-Start.png

     

    Like Frank, we denote schedules with a Group Member Attribute (but we don't do anything to restrict check-in by schedule, people here trade weeks all of the time or jump in to help even when they aren't scheduled). Hope that was helpful! 

     

  • Photo of Matt Whitsell

    1

    Hey Bronson, thanks for the comparison, this is very helpful.  I really like the seperate Group Viewer pages, as many times as I have read through the handbook, I have completely over looked the benefits of that set up, thanks!

    • Frank Grand

      Frank Grand

      For reference, we do the same thing, we currently have two viewer pages, one for all volunteer groups, one for home/small groups. We then have security groups for all staff so they can only see the groups that pertain to them. So a "Guest Services" staff person only has view access to the Guest Services Group Types, so even though we only have one page for all groups, staff will only see the groups that apply to them. Hope this helps!

    • Photo of Matt Whitsell

      0

      Thanks Frank, I appreciate your insights on using the group member attribute.  This has help me understand groups in a new light.

      Concerning your volunteers, are they assigned a specific Sunday to volunteer or is it every sunday?  If so, are you using a group member attribute to track and record when a volunteer is scheduled to serve?  We have some volunteers that only serve in a particular area on the "1st Sunday" so I am thinking through the best way to organize them.  

       

      thanks,

      • Frank Grand

        Frank Grand

        Matt, we have another group member attribute that is of type "Schedule." The majority of our volunteers do serve every Sunday, but we have teams that serve every other week. I would still suggest figuring out some way to indicate the serving schedule with a group member attribute.

      • Photo of Matt Whitsell

        0

        Thanks for the thoughts and ideas, these are very helpful to our planning!  I am looking forward to stealing some more ideas at the Rock-tober Conference!

         

        thanks,