How do groups connect to profiles in my database?
Overview
A group has no people of its own. Its members are profiles that already live in your database, and putting somebody in a group is a link, not a copy.
That one sentence explains most of the behaviour in this article: why a person can be in several groups, why removing them from a group leaves their profile untouched, and why guests on a reservation are held separately until they become profiles. This article is for administrators.
1. How do I put profiles into a group?
Two directions, and both end in the same place.
From the group. Open the group, go to the Members tab and click Assign members. You get your database in a picker, with search and column filters, so you can select profiles and save them into the group in one pass.
From the database. Select profiles in your Database and use the Assign groups action. This is the better route when you are working through a list of people rather than building up one partner.
2. Where else can I assign somebody to a group?
The Assign groups action turns up wherever you are already looking at a list of people:
- The Database, as a row action and as a bulk action
- A profile popup opened from an opportunity
- The Reservations and Hours Log, Attendees and Hours, Emergency contact and Medical information reports
- When you accept a form submission and add the person to your database
- When you move somebody through a sequence
- When you create a profile manually, where the group is one of the fields on the form
That last one is worth knowing about. If a corporate partner sends you a list of twelve names, create the profiles with the group already set rather than tidying up afterwards.
3. What is the difference between a Leader and a Member?
Every member of a group carries a role, shown in the Role column: Leader or Member. Change it from the row's action menu with Assign as leader or Assign as member.
The role is a label for your own coordination. It marks the person you deal with at that organization, and it is the natural default when you need to pick somebody to lead a reservation. It does not grant any extra permissions in Vome.
4. What can I do to members from inside the group?
The Members tab is a full profile list, not a read-only roster. On any row, or on a selection, you can:
- Assign shifts
- Add profile tags
- Add to a sequence
- Assign groups, so somebody can belong to more than one
- Assign a site
- Chat or Email them
- Remove from group
The list carries Email and Next shift columns, filters, quick search, and an export, so it doubles as a working list for the partner you are about to host.
5. What happens when I assign shifts to several members at once?
Vome asks you which of two things you meant, because they are genuinely different:
- Assign individually. Each person gets their own reservation on the shift. Use this when they happen to be attending the same shift but are not attending together.
- Create a group reservation. One reservation, one lead, and everybody else added as guests on it. You then pick which of the selected profiles is the reservation lead.
Once the assignment lands, Vome offers to open the reservation so you can add more guests, with the group and the lead already filled in. If you assign a single person to a single shift, you get the same offer.
The group's Schedule tab has a shorter path for the same thing: pick a shift, pick one member as the reservation leader, and continue straight to adding guests.
6. What is the Guests tab, and how is it different from Members?
Guests are people who have appeared on this group's reservations without necessarily being members of it. A member is somebody you deliberately attached to the group. A guest is somebody a reservation lead brought along.
The Guests tab lists them with first and last name, email, phone, age, next shift, last date volunteered, and two columns worth explaining:
- Database status, which tells you whether this guest exists as a profile in your database or only as a name on a reservation.
- Related member, which links the guest back to the member whose reservation they came in on.
This is where you find the people your reporting is quietly missing. A company that sends four members and sixteen guests looks like a group of four until you open this tab.
7. How do guests become profiles in my database?
Turn on Auto-add guests to database in the group reservation policy. Any guest added with a first name, last name and email is then created as a profile automatically, and a guest whose email matches an existing profile is linked to that profile rather than duplicated.
The same setting lets you have those new profiles automatically receive profile tags, sites, and an opportunity assignment (either the opportunity for that shift, or all of them).
If you turn this on after the fact, there is a backfill button that applies it to guests from existing reservations, past and upcoming, that use the policy. It runs in the background and notifies you when it finishes.
For the full detail, see How Auto-Add Guests to Database Works on Vome.
8. Can one person belong to more than one group?
Yes. Somebody can be a member of their employer's group and their family's group at the same time, and both groups will list them.
Group membership is a link, so there is no primary group and nothing to choose between. What matters for reporting is which group a given reservation was linked to, not which groups the person belongs to in general.
9. Does removing somebody from a group affect their profile?
No. Remove from group breaks the link and nothing else. Their profile, their hours, their tags and their history all stay exactly as they were.
Reservations they already made while linked to the group also keep that link, so removing a member does not rewrite your history.
Summary
- Group members are database profiles. Adding somebody to a group creates a link, never a second record.
- Assign from the group's Members tab, or from the Database and most report lists with Assign groups.
- Leader and Member are coordination labels, not permissions.
- The Members tab supports shifts, tags, sequences, sites, chat, email and export, so it works as a live list for a visiting partner.
- Assigning shifts to several members asks whether you want separate reservations or one group reservation.
- The Guests tab shows people who arrived on a member's reservation, with their database status and the member who brought them.
- Auto-add guests turns qualifying guests into profiles, deduplicated by email, with an optional backfill for past reservations.
- Somebody can belong to several groups, and removing them from one changes nothing on their profile.