Members-Systems Help

Help Topic: Putting your members into groups

You may divide and subdivide your members into groups - members can join one or more groups. this allows a very convenient method of sending messages to or administering only a sub-section of your membership.

You create a new group by selecting the menu item Groups|Manage Groups. From here you can view the groups that already exist for your organisation, create a new group at the top level, view subgroups of a group, or view the members of a particular group (which takes you to the View Members screen - see Finding Members). Group can be contained within groups - to create a subgroup, add a subgroup from the group display screen. To create a subgroup of a subgroup, first view the subgroup by stepping down through the hierarchy of groups and then create a new subgroup at the level you need.

As well as names, groups can also have Group Types. These are mainly of use to those organisations which registered with an Organisation Type. In this case, when you make Awards to members who are members of a group which has a Group Type, the initial awards to be shown will be those associated with that Group (e.g. in the event of a UK Scout Group, members of a group of type 'Cub Scout Pack' will have the Cub Scout Badges shown when you are making an award - see Making Awards to your members for further information on awards). You may also create your own group types (see Customising groups for your organisation's needs), but these are not associated with awards. Please contact Support if you would like to change your Organisation Type to take advantage of this convenient service. Members-Systems will update the awards available for Organisation Types as the parent organisations make changes.

To add or remove members to or from groups, either select a set of members from the View Members screen (see Finding Members) and select the 'Add members to Groups' or the 'Remove members from groups' actions, or when viewing a single member (see Viewing Member's Details) add or remove the member to a group from the Groups tab. Note that the date of joining or leaving a group is set (the default is today's date) and can be modified from a member's Groups tab.

Groups can also be associated with Events. If there are any future events associated with this group, then any members added to or removed from this group will also be added to or removed from the participants of these events(s), although they will not automatically be added to or removed from past group events. In this case, you will need to specify a participant status for these events for those members that you add to these events. For more details of group events see Group Events.