Participation Smart Groups

You can create participation groups in Members360°.  This type of group allows you to assign members to these groups, track their involvement over time, and correspond with them.  You can also display groups from your Members24x7 site if you desire.

A participation group is any collection of people that are participating in something for some length of time.  Examples of participation groups include, but are not limited to:

• Board of directors

• Committees

• Interest groups

• Volunteers

This section describes everything you need to know about participation groups, including:

• Creating participation groups

• Changing properties for an existing group

• Adding group members

• Removing group members

• Printing, emailing, and exporting group members

Creating participation groups

To create a new participation group on your Members360° site:

1. Navigate to Members > Groups.  This will show you the Groups page, similar to the example below.  All groups will be displayed within the group types you have created (see Group types).
   
   

2. Click the add participation group link in the upper right.  This will bring up a screen like the following:
   
   

3. Fill in the following details for your new group:

• Title: Give the group a name that identifies its purpose, such as Board of Directors or Legislative Liaisons.

• Group type: Choose the type of group you are creating from the pulldown, as demonstrated in the picture above.  This helps organize your groups into categories such as Board, Committee, etc.

  Note: You can add, change, and remove group types at any time.  Use the customize group types link under Related Tasks on the left as a shortcut to modifying your group types.   See Group and participation types for instructions on adding and changing group types.

• Group description: If you wish, type in a description of the group.  This is only accessible by Members360° administrators, so it's up to you whether you need a description and how detailed to make it.

4. If you wish to display this group on your Members24x7 website, click the Display this group on the public website option.  That will open up additional settings as described below.  See Displaying a group on your website for more details.

5. Click Add in the lower left to create the group.

Participation groups will be listed on the Groups page with a icon to their left, so you can distinguish them from smart groups (which are listed with a icon).

Changing the properties for an existing group

At any time, you can change the group type or display properties for a participation group.  Just click the name of the group from the Groups page, and then click the Group Properties tab at the top.

To make changes to the group type, description, or display properties, click edit on the far right.  From here, you can change the type assigned to the group, as well as the description for the group (which is only seen by administrators of Members360°).  For information on changing the public display settings, see Displaying a participation group on your website.

Adding group members

Once you have created a group, you will want to add members to it.  You can do this from the Groups page.  Just click the name of the group to which you wish to add members.  This will bring up the details of the group along with a listing of all the current members.  From here, click add member to group in the upper right.

When you click the add member to group link, you'll get a page like the following:

There are two ways to add members to the group: adding a single member, or adding several members at once using a criteria rule.

• To add a single member, choose the Member name option (which is chosen by default).  Then type the last name of the member, or the name of the organization, in the box below.  The system will auto-match what you type as you type it, so you only need to add a few letters to find the member you wish to add.

• To add several members at once, choose the Smart group option.  Then choose the appropriate group that includes the members you wish to add to this participation group.  In other words, this allows you to add all the members from one group to another.  It is especially useful when you have a smart group (see Smart Groups) that defines all the members of a participation group you're creating, or if all the members in one participation group also belong in a second group you're creating.

  For example, let's say you have a checkbox field in the database called Board member, and you have a smart group called Board Members (database) that includes all your members with this field checked off.  You can add all the members of this group to a participation group of your executive committee using this technique, as shown below.  This will add all the people in the Board Members (database) group to the Executive Committee group.

Once you have chosen a member or a group, fill out the rest of the form as described below.

• Participation Type: From the pulldown, choose what type of group member this particular member is.  If you need to add a value to this pulldown (such as President or Member), see Group and participation types.

• Start Date: Enter the date that the member joined or was elected or appointed to this group.  If you don't know the start date, you can leave it blank, but enter it if you know it.

• End Date: Enter the date that the member will leave this group (for example, when a board member's term expires).  If you don't yet know the end date, you can leave it blank and fill it in later.

If this group is set up to display online, then you'll have additional fields to set in order to correctly populate biographical and other information.  See Adding biography information for more information.

When finished, click to add the member or members.  Click if you change your mind and do not wish to add the member or members.

Removing group members

You can remove a member from a group by clicking the group's name from the Groups page, and then clicking the delete icon to the right of his/her name.  This will remove the member from the group and record in the member's history that he/she was removed from the group.  Only do this if the member was added by mistake; if the member left the group, just make sure the End Date for the member's participation is correct.

Printing, emailing, and exporting group members

While looking at the group members for a group