Full guide to Simple Groups

Before starting

Simple groups are an easy way to organize and segment your community. These can reflect, for example, the different categories in your nonprofit (different types of donors, members, and contacts). This segmentation can be done manually, or automatically based on defined criteria.

Simple groups will also allow you to delegate part of your responsibilities by assigning admins who will be able to use certain features of the main platform.

This article covers the following points:

• 2 types of Simple Groups: Regular and Dynamic
• How to create a Simple Group
• Main functions of a Simple Group

No time to read? Check out this video to create a regular group:

And this video to create a dynamic group:

2 types of Simple Groups: Regular and Dynamic

When creating a Simple Group, you can choose between these two types: Regular groups and Dynamic groups.

Regular Groups

A Regular Group allows adding members only manually.

I.e. If you have a volunteer group and Erica decides to join, you must manually add her to your group "Volunteers". 

Dynamic Groups

In contrast, dynamic groups will automatically assign people to a given group based on the information recorded in their profile.

I.e. For the group "Volunteers of Chicago", you can set the assignment rules to include members who (1) Live in Chicago and (2) Are marked as "Volunteer" in your community.

Each time you add a person that meets the chosen criteria, they will automatically be added to the group.

How to create a Simple Group

Regular Groups

To create a Regular Group, just follow these steps:

• Head over to Community > Groups and click on New Group.
• Select the option Regular Group in the pop-up window.

• Select the people you want to add to the group and click Add to Group. You can also add multiple people at once through an Excel import.

Additionally, you can add members to an existing group from the Contacts tab.

Dynamic Groups

There are 2 ways to create a Dynamic Group:

1. From Community > Groups, by clicking on New Group and choosing the option Dynamic group.

   

   • Here group members are added based on criteria. Choose which criteria should be used by selecting a field and its value, for example, "Address" and "City = Chicago".
     
     
   • The software automatically adds the contacts that match these criteria to the group.
     
     

   Assigning someone to a dynamic group is instantaneous: if a person moves from Chicago to New York and their address is updated in the CRM, they will automatically be removed from the selected group.

   Available fields to use as criteria:

   • Default information fields (address, telephone, gender, etc.) set by the software.
   • Custom fields that you have created.
   • The information on Memberships and Donations.

   As the software automatically adds contacts to groups depending on whether they match the criteria or not, you sometimes need to fill in the value of the criteria, especially for the custom fields. In the example above, the admin would need to fill in Chicago in the City option.

2. From Community > Contacts, by clicking the Refine button and select the criteria in the Advanced Search bar.

• You can then add the people who meet a given criteria to a group by selecting them and clicking Add to a group > Create Group.

Creating a dynamic group from the CRM will allow you to use the additional criteria linked to that page (password, last time the connection was online, etc.).

Main functions of a Simple Group

Assigning an Admin to a group

You may want to limit the access of an Admin to a group or to delegate the group's management to them.

You can set up an Admin per group, who will then be able to manage the group, add people to it and use the features accessible to that group.

Due to technical limitations, if anyone has access rights to features at a higher level (on the main platform or in an advanced group), and is assigned to be an administrator to a simple group, they will automatically have the main admin rights at the higher level.

Delegating features

You can segment your CRM and give your groups access to part of the overall features. A group can:

• Manage its own CRM
• Use attendance lists
• Send simple emails, as well as email campaigns