Overview
Before you create your first group, there are a few decisions worth making deliberately, because they are awkward to reverse once a year of reservations has gone through.
Those decisions are explained in Vome's Setup Guide rather than here. This page points you at them, and then tells you what else lives in this section. This article is for administrators.
1. The decisions, and where each one is explained
- What are groups, and do I need them?
The first question, and a genuine one. Groups are an Enterprise module you can skip if nobody ever asks you how many hours a particular company or school contributed. Also settles who assigns membership: administrators, the people themselves, or both.
- Profile, opportunity, shift and group tags: what is the difference?
Vome has four kinds of tag and they do different jobs. Read this before you invent a tagging scheme, since a group tag and a profile tag are not interchangeable.
- What are shift policies, and which do I need?
Group reservations reach a shift through a policy. This is the overview of how policies work in general, and which ones you actually need.
- Which chatrooms does Vome create automatically?
A group can have its own chatroom, synced to its members. This explains where that sits among the other chatrooms Vome generates.
2. Why are those articles somewhere else?
An article on Vome's help centre lives in exactly one section, so anything that spans several modules has to sit in one of them. The setup decisions above are cross-cutting, so they live in the Setup Guide, which walks through the whole account stage by stage.
This page exists so that you find them from here too, rather than having to know the Setup Guide was there.
3. What is in this section?
Once the decisions are made, the how-to articles are here:
- How does the Groups module work on Vome? Creating groups, the five tabs on a group's dashboard, group tags, and finding one group among many.
- How do groups connect to profiles in my database? Members and guests, leaders, and how a guest on a reservation becomes a profile.
- Group reservation policies: every setting explained Party size, age groups, eligibility, guest information, auto-add and form rules.
- How do I report on a group's participation and hours? Which field to sum, why a lead's profile shows only their own hours, and how to export.
The mechanics of the reservation itself, as opposed to its policy, sit under Schedule and Hour Tracking, in Group Reservation Management on Vome.
4. If you only do one thing
Decide now whether reservations must carry a group name, and turn that on in your group reservation policy before your first group visit.
Everything else in the Groups module can be tidied up later. A reservation that was never linked to a group cannot be totalled by organization, and reconstructing who came with whom, months afterwards, is the one job nobody manages to do well.