Best Practice for Ending a Group Season (Including Semesters)
If you're wondering what you should do with your groups at the end of each season or semester, then answer the following questions:
1. Will most groups on average keep the same members, leaders, meeting time and location?
2. Is it important for you to go back to any previous semester and see a detailed snapshot and metrics of a group's experience from that semester? e.g, who was on the roster, average attendance, health survey scores, etc..
3. Is it important for you to know how many total semesters a person has been involved in a group?
4. Is it important for you to know how many total semester-based groups a person has been involved with?
If you answered yes to most of those questions, then we recommend that you clone each group at the end of the semester and then archive all of the groups that just ended. You can always find and access archived groups.
Learn more about cloning groups
Learn more about archiving groups
Learn more about archiving groups for FellowshipOne
More Details for Your Group Ending Options
1. Archive Groups
If most of your groups will disband and most members and/or leaders will not return for the next season, then your best course of action is to archive your groups then create new ones for the next season or semester.
The benefit of GroupVitals is that you can never delete a group, only archive. This means you'll always have a record and snapshot of every group you've ever had in every season. Now, you'll be able to know exactly which groups people have been in and see the full history of a group, such as their roster, when they met, etc..(The timeline tab can be very valuable here).
2. Inactivate Groups
Making a group inactive can work in several situations. If most everything will stay the same about the group and they are just on pause, then we suggesting you make them inactive. But, if it's important for you to keep records of each season a person was in a group, then you may consider cloning the group for the next season and archiving the previous one.
FYI - If you choose this option, then at the end of the next season, when you make your groups inactive via the main groups page, you can set a date for when they'll all automatically become active again. You can also set a group to be inactive via their individual profile and set a date for them to become active again automatically. Also, you'll want to be sure that each group's "next meeting date" is set correctly in order for attendance to generate at the correct time.
3. Clone Groups
This option works great for semester-based group schedules and if each group will generally have more members and leaders return than not. It also works great if you just want a clean snapshot or record of who was all was in a particular group during a particular season. Cloning a group will allow you to create a copy of the group and once you do, you'd archive the previous group.
A good naming convention for these groups would be "Johnson Group - Fall 2021" and then for the Spring semester or Fall semester, you'd clone the group and rename the cloned group to "Johnson Spring 2021".
With this method, you'll be able to keep a snapshot and record of all the groups you had for each semester.
4. Keep Groups Active
If your groups will stop meeting for a season but plan on returning back later, and you still want them to be available for people to at least sign up for during the offseason, then we recommend keeping those groups active.
Keeping them active will allow the group to show up on the GroupFinder and be available as an option to place a prospect in.
If you don't want attendance to generate for these groups, then you can either disable the attendance via the Add Ons area, or you can disable it individually for each group, or, you can set the "next meeting date" for each group to their future meeting date and attendance won't generate until then.
Notes:
When it comes to metrics, it's best to at least make your groups inactive during seasons when your groups are not meeting. This way, it won't skew your dashboard or group metrics.