2019 Product Updates
Here are all the little and big things we're doing to make GroupVitals even better 👍
December 2019 🎄
🚀 Enhancements 👇
We added a feature to the attendance email so that group leaders can leave notes when their group didn't meet!
🐜 Bug Fixes 👇
We fixed a bug where Health Surveys were being sent out at random.
November 2019 🦃
🚀 Enhancements 👇
We improved notification options for senior coaches! They're now notified when: attendance is taken, a note was left on a group's meeting, a group's status was updated (either made active or inactive) or a group is archived within their span of care.
We streamlined things in our system so that when a leader is removed from a group or their role is updated to member (or admin or guest) their leader role is automatically made inactive.
If none of your groups offer childcare, we've removed the childcare filter on the GroupFinder page to best reflect your groups' offerings and align expectation for prospective members. We've also added a toggle feature so that you can completely disable the childcare options from the GroupFinder!
🐜 Bug Fixes 👇
We fixed a bug that was causing the social media buttons on a group's GroupFinder page to disappear.
We fixed a bug that was causing metrics for November 11th to not generate correctly.
October 2019 🎃
🚀 Enhancements 👇
Group leaders can now update their group's roster right after taking attendance! On the attendance taken confirmation page, they now see a button to update their roster. This takes them to a secure group roster page where they can add or remove people as well as change their roles. This feature is enabled by default, but you can always turn it off. Just go to the Add-ons > Attendance > Settings window and toggle it off there.
To help save time when adding new members, we've removed the relationship status requirement on the Add New Person form.
We've added an export option on the All People hub that gives you lots of options for which information and filters to include. Simply click the sub menu (three vertical dots) and select "Export People."
We've added a life stage section to group's GroupFinder page to help people find a group that fits best for them and their season of life.
🐜 Bug Fixes 👇
We fixed a bug that was sending Group Health Surveys to no longer active group members.
We fixed a bug so that if attendance is turned on the same day as a group meeting, the attendance for the group will generate so that group leader can take attendance.
September 2019 🏫
🚀 Enhancements 👇
We gave the attendance taken email report a makeover! You can now see a lot more helpful details such as who attended, meeting notes, guests, etc..
🐜 Bug Fixes 👇
We fixed a bug that would sometimes cause a new prospect to not properly show up on the Prospect Pipeline.
August 2019 ☀️
🚀 Enhancements 👇
You can now customize the People Status field options! We created a new tab call People in the Settings area.
We made some slight changes to our wording within the software and email notifications to better support non-churches. We felt these changes were so minor and would have minimal impact on most churches. E..g, we changed Ministry Attributes to just Attributes.
🐜 Bug Fixes 👇
We fixed an issue with the quick deep links to the GroupFinder not working for the Group Model dropdown.
F1 - When editing a group in GV, if the group's F1 group type becomes disconnected, you can select a new one and we'll only show the actively connected F1 group types.
If an archived person filled out the form to join a group, they now become active.
We fixed an issue where if you set your groups to go inactive on a certain date, they weren't actually being set to inactive.
July 2019 🇺🇸
🚀 Enhancements 👇
We improved things behind the scenes. Specifically, we now do a better job tracking errors that happen, so we can more easily identify and fix issues as they come up.
We added the group leader's email as the "reply-to" for the attendance taken email notification. This makes is super easy for you to reply directly to the leader with any specific questions or comments about their group meeting.
You can now send a mass email message based upon the group model.
F1 - When updating a person in GV, we only update F1 with the updated fields, rather than just updating F1 with all the person's information.
🐜 Bug Fixes 👇
When deleting a campus, it now properly reassociates people with the new campus you select.
F1 - We're once again properly pulling over a group's meeting location set in F1.
June 2019 🏖
🚀 Enhancements 👇
We now show the group's Address 2 meeting location field and the leader's cell # on the confirmation email sent to new group members.
We made some improvements behind the scenes to our development workflow to increase the quality 👍
🐜 Bug Fixes 👇
We made some fixes in how groups show up if they were closed and the closed group feature is then disabled.
Fixed an issue where if you set the hide exact location for groups on the GroupFinder, it then removes this same setting for each individual group, since it was set globally to hidden.
May 2019
🚀 Enhancements
We made a lot of backend system enhancements and upgrades to improve performance.
🐜 Bug Fixes
If a group leader unsubscribes from attendance emails, they'll no longer receive them.
Fixed an issue where if you were trying to send a mass email to prospects in the contacted stage, it wasn't showing any email recipients.
Fixed an issue with the health survey results page showing responses outside of the selected time period if you kept scrolling down.
April 2019
🚀 Enhancements 👇
if the group is closed and they have a meeting time, then we now show that meeting time on the GroupFinder list view.
We made the custom group name case-sensitive in the email notifications that go out to new group members.
We adjusted the time of day attendance reminders go out. It's now 5am CT that day after, rather than 9pm the day of. This will better account for night owl groups that meet after 9pm.
🐜Bug Fixes 👇
Fixed an issue with the group members people export showing all the values in the wrong column on the spreadsheet.
If a group leader with a really long name has a coach, it now fully shows their name on their coach's profile page.
If you have the "closed groups" feature enabled AND you have a full group (and they are marked closed), then if you decide to disable the "closed groups" feature, then any group that was full now remains closed.
March 2019 🍀
🚀 You can reply to an attendance taken notification email and your reply will go to the person who took attendance for the group.
🚀 You can now send out a mass email via Messages to groups or leaders based upon a specific "group model" they are under.
🚀 You can now see the personal attendance chart for apprentice leaders on their profile.
🐜Fixed an issue where merged records didn't correctly merge the notification settings.
🐜 When a full group becomes open again, the group's sign up form on the GroupGinder will be re-enabled if it was previously enabled before it became full.
🐜 If your church account settings has Closed Groups turned off, then you'll no longer see the irrelevant "Open" on/off toggle setting when editing a group's profile.
🐜Attendance reminders are now going back out around 5am CT.
🐜 When exporting members via the groups page, we now included the "address 2" field/column.
February 2019 ❤️
🚀 You can now re-add a campus that you previously deleted.
🚀 We added more GroupFinder statuses for this search filter when viewing all of your groups. Now, you can see which groups currently have their GroupFinder signup form manually turned off or turned off because the group is closed.
🚀When viewing all of your groups and you use the attendance search filter, it now updates all of your metrics at the top to reflect the filtered groups. Now, you can get accurate counts to questions like: how many groups meet last week? how many didn't meet? how many haven't filled out attendance yet?
🚀 We improved the export on the page that lists all group members. It now includes their last attendance date and we separated out each group and role they are in to make sorting/filtering easier for you. Thanks, Jesse B. for the suggestions!
🚀When sending an email to a group, you'll now see which people won't get the email because they've unsubscribed.
🚀We added "Group Campus" as segment option when sending any type of mass email. We then re-labled the existing Campus search filter to say Person's Campus, so it's more clear.
🐜Prospects weren't showing up when viewing all people, now they do.
🐜We stopped syncing a group's longitude and latitude meeting location with F1, because we generate our own and in doing so, we'll have less conflicts with mapping the group on the GroupFinder.
🐜When you make an inactive or archived group active again, we remove the previous end date.. so that the group doesn't go inactive or archived the following day.
🐜 We got rid of the ability for someone to unsubscribe from the account invite emails.
🐜We had some attendance notification issues earlier this month. Once we fixed the issue, we updated our notification system so that we now log whenever an attendance reminder gets sent and it's status. Also, every few hours our system checks the status of all attendance notifications and if some haven't been sent successfully, it will re-try. This will help improve the reliability of our attendance notifications.
🐜We found a few email notifications around a group's attendance average stopped sending, so we fixed that. Thanks Ryan P for the heads up!
🐜 We fixed an issue where some staff members were getting duplicate emails. We also stopped sending the note taken on a group email when a group takes attendance and includes a note, because it was redundant.
🐜 We found that for campus staff, they were able to see people who were just group members of the campus the staff is assigned to. Now, we only will allow campus-specific staff to see people in leadership from the same campus, as well as groups.
🐜 F1 - The group's meeting schedule stopped properly updating in F1, so we fixed that.
🐜 Some prospects showed they were pending acceptance but they were already accepted. It was because they were a previous prospect for another group and they weren't accepted into it. We updated this so that it only shows the acceptance status for the current group they are a prospect of.
🐜 F1 - We fixed a bug that was causing new groups created in F1 to not pull over all the members and leaders.
January 2019 ❄️
🚀 New Unique Members Metric
You can now see the "Total Members" and "Unique Members" you have in your groups at the top of the page on your Members list.
🚀🚫 People to Closed Groups
You can no longer
🚀 See Inactive People When Adding to Group
When searching to add someone to a group, you'll now see if they have the inactive status under their name.
🚀 New Prospect Follow-up Notification Toggle
We added a new notification toggle so you can turn on/off the prospect follow-up notification emails.
🚀 See the GroupFinder Status in Group Export
When you export a group via your
🐜If you make all of your groups active at once, we no longer automatically set an inactive date for inactive groups that had a date set to become active.
🐜F1 - We disconnected the sync for a group's meeting location longitude and latitude. We still sync the address, but we use Google Maps to determine the longitude/latitude now.
🐜Fixed an issue where sometimes the placement preferences on the general sign up form weren't being saved properly.
🐜For groups that meeting online, we no longer show a zip code or city name for their meeting location. Since, um, they meet online and not in a zip code or city.
🐜You can no longer set the group's next meeting date to a date that's before the group's start date. We're not sure why you would anyway, but some people did it 🤷♂️
🐜F1 - New families added in F1 now correctly get associated with each other in GroupVitals.
🐜The search filter drop-down labeled "People Status" in the All People list now correctly pre-checks all the statuses we show you by default. FYI - we don't show archived or deceased people.
🐜If you toggle off the group roster updated notification, it actually stops sending you those emails. Hooray!
🐜If you want to add a new campus and you're using the same name of a campus you had previously added and then deleted, we'll let ya!