Regular & Search Groups

While Groups were covered on a basic level, let’s look at some of the more versatile functions of Groups and set up some small groups. Groups are essential for gathering attendance data so you and your team can identify the people falling through the cracks and prompt your team to follow up. Doing this on a larger scale might be more difficult, so small groups are a great way to provide the necessary care.

Groups are separated into two types: Regular and Search. The main difference between these two types is that Regular Groups can be populated manually by adding people to groups or automatically through a Form or Process; Search Groups populate based on a series of search parameters based on the owner’s preferences. This makes Search Groups very useful in finding specific groups of people based on their information. A simple example of this would be the default UCare Search Group that tracks birthdays in the next 14 days.

In this Part, we will set up some small Groups and look at the many available options for Search Groups.

Small Groups

While we’ve already created some Groups, we will briefly review how to create one and then delve into the many different features available, such as sharing your published groups, marking attendance and generating reports.  Small groups are vital to providing care, and UCare’s data will simplify gauging a group’s health.

Just to recap, to create a Group, click + New → Group. Once you’ve set a Type and Name, you can add members manually or specify qualifiers that add people to the group. We’ll get to the latter shortly.

Once you have your Group, you can access it by clicking Groups on the navbar.

Share Published Groups

You can add the published group list to your website or church app. To share the list of published groups, tap the Share Published Groups button in the top right of the Groups’ page:

This will give you multiple sharing options, including email and Facebook, JavaScript embed codes for your website, and even a Link QR Code. 

You can enter as much or as little information in each Group’s description and include More details about your groups, such as Age, Gender, Suburb, etc. Here is an example of a published group list; only groups with visibility set to Featured or Published will display. Featured groups will always be displayed at the start of the list. 

In the published list, we can see the Contact group leader buttons so people can contact the leaders of the groups they are interested in. You can set Leaders under the Leaders in a Group. This lets you publish up-to-date group information without making group leaders’ contact information visible online. 

The dropdowns at the top of the page will be determined by the More details entered about each Group.

Sharing your groups is a great way for people to see what is available and allows them to choose how and where they connect.

Once your small groups are set up, you can create Meetings by clicking +New → Meeting. This was covered previously, so we will touch on it briefly.

When a new Meeting is created, set which Group will participate. For the above example, we’re making a small group Meeting for Jane’s Bible Study. You can send attendance report reminders to Leaders so they can mark off who the attendees are; they do not need access to UCare to do this.

Use the dropdown to select a profile:

Once attendance is recorded, you can view attendance reports from the Group page, giving you an overview of Group health and the people who might need to be followed up.

There are also other reporting options that you can view under the Reports tab.

These reports will include information specific to that Group. If you would like a summary report on all your Groups, an option for this is detailed below.

On the top right of the Groups page, you can find a button for Group reports. Clicking this button will give you access to various report types. These summary reports generate reports across multiple group types.

Now that we’ve looked at some of your Small Groups and the different reporting functions available let’s look at Search Groups.

Search Groups

Search Groups are populated based on search parameters. You can tell which of your Groups are Search Groups by the Search tag next to the name.

You can use many different search filters for Search Groups, making it one of the most versatile features in UCare. We will look at some of the many filters you can add to create a Search Group; however, with so many options, we will only cover some of them. Once you know how to make a Search Group, exploring these options will be much simpler.

To create a Search Group, click +New → Group.

Much of this process is the same as creating a regular Group. Click the Search to find group members tab to make this a Search Group. 

A dropdown will display once this option is selected, allowing you to find people based on your chosen parameter. You can add multiple of these filters by clicking the + button.  

There are many different search options, so for this one, let’s create a Group for people who have not attended a meeting recently. To do this, select the below option in the Find people dropdown:

From there, you can specify which Meeting:

As this is a small group, there are likely to be many people who have not attended this meeting. We will add additional parameters to narrow our search results. Let’s identify the people who are not part of another small group to see if we can connect them to this one. We’ll add the following parameters:

Lastly, if you are a multi-campus site, you may want to narrow this search to a specific area code. We’ll add another parameter for this. This is what the search parameters should look like at the end:

Once your parameters are done, set the security access for the Group and click the Save button.

You can now access the Search Group from the Groups list. This Group will also update in real-time, so you will not need to ‘refresh’ this at any point unless you wish to edit the search parameters. With so many search parameters, there are numerous Search Group options, so take the time to experiment with these.

In the next Part, we’ll look at the communication methods available in UCare.