How does the Groups module work on Vome?
Overview
A group is a named record for an organization that volunteers with you: a company, a school, a congregation, a family. You attach people to it, you attach reservations to it, and from then on the partnership has a history you can total.
This article is a tour of the module itself. It covers creating a group, what lives on a group's dashboard, group tags, and the housekeeping tools you need once you have more than a handful of groups. This article is for administrators.
1. Is a group the same thing as a group reservation?
No, and this is the most common mix-up.
- A group reservation is one person booking several spots on a shift. It lives on the shift, it is configured by a group reservation policy, and it works on Pro with no groups at all.
- A group is a named record in the Groups module that people and reservations belong to. It needs Enterprise.
You can run group reservations forever without creating a single group. What you cannot do is add them up by organization afterwards, because without a group there is nothing to add them up by. See Group reservation policies: every setting explained for the reservation side.
2. How do I create a group?
Go to Groups in the left-hand navigation and click + New group.
The create popup asks for three things:
- Group name, required. This is the name that will follow every reservation the group makes, so pick the form you want to see in reports and stick to it.
- Description, optional.
- Sites, optional, and only relevant if you use the Sites module.
Click Create group and the group exists. Everything else, including the logo and cover photo, is added afterwards from the group's own dashboard.
Groups can also be created by a user during a reservation, if you allow it in the group reservation policy. That is covered in section 6 of the policy article.
3. What is on a group's dashboard?
Click any group card to open its dashboard. There are five tabs.
- Members. The database profiles that belong to this group, with a role of Leader or Member. This is the tab you will use most.
- Guests. People who have appeared on this group's reservations as guests, whether or not they have a profile of their own.
- Schedule. The group's upcoming and past shifts.
- Reservations log. Every reservation linked to this group, permanently scoped to the group so you cannot accidentally read another group's numbers.
- Details. The group's settings: name, logo, cover photo, description, group tags, sites, and its chatroom.
Members, Guests and the reporting tabs are covered in their own articles, linked at the bottom of this page.
4. What can I change on the Details tab?
Each setting is its own card:
- Group name and Description.
- Logo and Cover photo, both optional. A logo makes a group far easier to pick out of a long list, and it is worth adding for your regular partners.
- Group tags, covered in the next section.
- Sites, with read-only or read and edit access per site, plus a Manage in Sites link if you would rather do it from the Sites module.
- Communication, which turns the group's chatroom on or off.
Changes are not live until you click Save changes. Delete group sits on the same row, so take care.
5. What are group tags?
Group tags are labels on the group itself, not on people. They describe what kind of group it is: Corporate Group, School Group, Faith Group, Family, and so on.
The point of them is reporting one level up. A group tag lets you answer "how much did our corporate partnerships contribute this year" in one query, instead of adding up twenty named companies by hand.
To manage them, use Manage group tags from the Groups module. You can create, rename and delete tags there. To put tags on a group, use Assign group tags from the group card's three-dot menu, or the Group tags card on the Details tab.
Worth keeping straight: a profile tag sits on a person and can gate what they see. A group tag sits on a group and is purely descriptive. They are different systems and they do not interact.
6. How do I find one group when I have a hundred?
The left-hand panel of the Groups module gives you several ways to cut the list:
- By group tag, which buckets the cards under each tag, with an Untagged bucket for the rest.
- By site, if you use Sites. You can turn both on at once, and you get sites with tag buckets nested inside them.
- Site filters, to narrow to one or more sites without regrouping.
- Sorting: name A to Z or Z to A, date created newest or oldest, and members most or fewest.
- Search, for when you already know the name.
7. Can I act on several groups at once?
Yes. Select the cards you want, or use Select all, and you can:
- Assign group tags to all of them
- Remove group tags from all of them
- Delete them
For a single group, the three-dot menu on its card carries the same actions plus Edit group, which drops you straight onto the Details tab.
8. Does a group get its own chatroom?
It can. Turn on the chat option in the Communication card on the Details tab, and Vome creates a chatroom whose membership stays synchronised with the group's current members. You can also make it announcement-only, so administrators post and members read.
It is off by default. It is the natural way to talk to a partner organization as a unit rather than messaging their people one at a time.
9. What happens when I delete a group?
The group record goes, and it cannot be undone. The people do not go anywhere: their profiles stay in your database exactly as they were, they simply stop being members of anything.
Be aware that reservations linked to that group lose the link, which means the historical reporting you built the group for goes with it. If your only problem is that a group is no longer active, leaving it in place costs you nothing and keeps the history.
10. Can I restrict an administrator to one group?
No. Administrator access is scoped by site, opportunity and profile tag, not by group. A group is a reporting and communication object, not a permissions boundary.
If you need somebody to only ever see one partner's people, look at profile tags and admin scoping instead.
Summary
- A group is a named record that people and reservations attach to. The Groups module needs Enterprise; group reservations do not.
- Create one with + New group. Only the name is required, and it is the name that will show up in every report.
- A group's dashboard has five tabs: Members, Guests, Schedule, Reservations log and Details.
- Group tags categorise groups themselves, so you can report on every corporate partner at once.
- Organize the list by group tag, by site, or by sorting and search.
- Bulk actions cover tagging and deleting. The card's three-dot menu adds Edit group.
- A group can have a synced chatroom, off by default, with an announcement-only option.
- Deleting a group keeps the profiles but loses the reporting history.