At the top of the screen, tap + New and then tap group in the menu.
Groups are a simple yet powerful way to keep your church, ministries, and teams organized; you can even use them to build small groups or keep track of things such as gifting. You can create groups for anything really; it helps you organize your church as needed. Groups also allow you to keep people connected with quick and easy email templates and SMS messages or view one of the many reports.
Search groups are just like regular groups, except people are included based on easily selected criteria. Use it to create any report you need and to ensure people don't slip through the cracks.
When your church first signed up for UCare, several groups were added to help you understand what groups you may need. You can change or delete these groups to better suit your church.
Tip: When meeting attendance is submitted, a notification is sent to the leaders of the group. If this group is a small group, you may want one of the group leaders to be the small group's pastor so that any pastoral care information is sent to them when attendance is submitted.
Note: You need to save the group before you can add members. After the group has been saved, click "Add people" and then start searching for the people, households, or groups of people you want to add.
More details
If you tap More details, you'll see the following extra options.
When a person receives an email sent through UCare, they have the option to unsubscribe. If you set a group to be a mailing list, then when the person goes to unsubscribe, they'll have the opportunity to unsubscribe from one or more groups or all email. For example, you could set your worship team group as a mailing list; then, people can unsubscribe to email from just that group instead of unsubscribing to all your church's email.
If you are using the published group list, then visibility is used to determine if a group should be displayed in that list.
When meetings start to get added for a group, blue attendance dots appear to indicate how connected each group member is. By default, attendance for the last 60 days is shown; tapping More details will allow you to change this as needed.
Group permissions
Security areas can manage which people can view groups and are often used to manage groups for multi-site churches. You can only view groups that are not restricted or that are restricted to a security area that you have permission to.
There are also three types of group permissions in UCare that further control who can view and edit a group.
Public: A public group can be changed by people with "People & households" permission.
Protected: A protected group can be viewed by people with "People & households" permission but can only be changed by group leaders.
Private: A private group can only be viewed and changed by group leaders.
Note: The "Groups & meetings" permission is intended for small group leaders who need to update group members' profiles. As such, people with this permission can only view the groups they lead.
Note: People who are a member of public groups are considered active. Admins can view the subscription page to get an estimate for your next invoice to view a list of all active profiles and archive profiles of no longer active people.