2018 Product Updates
Here are all the little and big things we're doing to make GroupVitals even better 👍
December 2018 🎄
🚀Staff can now only send out mass emails to people and groups that are associated with the campus(es) that the staff member is assigned to.
🐜F1 - If the connection between F1 and GroupVitals expires (sometimes F1 does that), the notice that is shown to you doesn't appear if you end up disabling the F1 add-on.
🐜The people counts at the top of each column in the prospect pipeline no longer shows 0.
🐜We now properly pull over the address 2 field for a person from F1.
🐜The initial F1 <> GV sync notification now correctly shows you how many groups and people we synced when you do it for the first time.
🐜The group's campus, start date, end date and address 2 field now correctly sync with F1 once again.
November 2018 🦃
🚀 Enable/Disable Group-Level Attendance
You can now disable attendance for specific groups if you don't want/need them to take attendance each time they meet. You'll find this new setting toggle on the group's profile under the Edit tab as well as the Attendance tab.
🚀 Last Attendance Status Filter
See which groups last met, didn't meet or haven't taken attendance yet. Click on "Groups" in the top nav to view your groups. The pull up the search filters by clicking on the drop-down arrow next to the search box. You'll see a new search filter labeled "Last Attendance Status." This is helpful to know which groups are and aren't taking attendance as well as if you need a weekly report of all the groups that have met.
🚀 Improved Notification Settings
In the footer of every email that is sent by GroupVitals now includes a link to immediately opt-out of that specific type of email, as well as a new link to change their notification settings. The notification settings now do not require someone to be logged in and it also allows anyone with an email on the database to control their notification preferences, regardless of their group participation.
🐜We fixed some issues where a group wouldn't show up on the GroupFinder map sometimes.
🐜The login experience is now much faster for large churches.
🐜We fixed an issue where some leaders were getting an attendance text reminder even though they had this setting off.
🐜We fixed an issue the new group member added email notification was sent to staff, even though they had this setting off.
🐜If someone has the apprentice leader level role and are a former group leader, then the group leader tab on their personal profile is now shown as active.
🐜If you add a middle name via the person's Edit tab or via the edit option on a group profile, it now correctly pushes that middle name to F1.
🐜The nightly sync with F1 is now back to it's normal speed. Currently, it takes about 5 hours to sync all the churches.
October 2018 🎃
🚀 Member Attendance MetricsYou can now see each group members attendance metrics right on their card in their group's profile.
🚀 Member Health Survey Score
You can now see someone's health survey score right on their group card in their personal profile and on their card in their group's profile. You can click on their health score and a pop-up will show you the details of their health survey (no more having to only view this in the health survey results area!). This metric and information can only be seen account admins and staff and not by the group leaders. The role of senior coach and coach can see this only for people within their span of care.
🚀 GroupVitals Is Faster!
We moved everything over Google's Cloud Platform, which will allow us to expand our resources without any limitations.
🚀 Children in All People List
We now include children when you go to People > All People. If you want to see just adults (and the metrics at the top of the page to be for adults), then use the new search filter and select head of household and spouse from the Family Rolse filter.
🚀 Family Role Seach Filter
On the All People list, there's a new filter to see people with a specific family role (head of household, spouse & child)
🚀 Staff Who Are Coaches Can Edit
If someone has a staff view role and they are a coach, they'll now be able to edit any group or person within their span of care and also take notes.
🚀 Upgraded Maps
We upgraded our maps technology for the GroupFinder and for a group's internal profile.
🚀 Guests are Engaged People
On the All People list, if you select to see engaged people, we now include guests.
🐜When view your list of leaders, the filter to show only those without a coach is now working correctly.
🐜You can no longer set the current date as the end date for a group. Doing so in the past resulted in nothing happening. If you want a group to end, go ahead and set it to inactive or archive it.
🐜For some churches with multiple campuses, the Avg People in Active Groups dashboard metric is now accurate for campus pastors who select a different time period than the default one.
🐜Some staff members will now no longer receive multiple notifications for the same person when they're removed from a group.
🐜On mobile, you can now properly see the specific message you sent under Messages > Sent.
🐜If a staff member is set to receive health survey notification emails and that staff member is removed, then we'll assign an account admin to automatically receive those email notifications. This way, someone is at least getting them!
🐜The Need Help? button on the GroupFinder was blocking some users from using all the search filters on mobile. We shorted the text of that button label so that the button is smaller and that fixed the problem!
September 2018 🏫
🚀 You can now disable the signup form for a group's GroupFinder profile and show a custom message instead. This can be changed in the group's profile under the edit tab. Phase 2 of this will be able to globally toggle on/off the signup form for all groups listed on the GroupFinder.
🚀 When you send an email to a group via their profile, you now have the option to send it as a CC or BCC.
🚀 You can now set a start date for a group to a date in the past. This is great for churches who have recently started using GroupVitals and want to keep accurate information about groups that started before switching to GroupVitals.
🚀 We made the GroupFinder group type limitation an on/off toggle. So if you'd like to limit which group types are on the GroupFinder, you can toggle it to on, then select which group types you'd like to only be shown on the GroupFinder.
🚀 On the prospect pipeline, if you click on the gear icon near the top-right and choose export prospects, it now includes which group the person is a prospect for. (Thanks Shelby M. for the suggestion!)
🐜 Some leaders who had a coach assigned to them were showing up on the leader's list when you checked to only show leaders who have no coaches.
🐜 (F1) When adding a new person to a group on the roster check, that person will now have the same F1 person status as someone who was added to a group via attendance. The specific F1 person status for the roster check can be changed in your GV F1 settings.
🐜 If you limited the GroupFinder to only show specific group types, we now properly show the group's GroupFinder status on their profile's left sidebar.
🐜 We made the sort order on the attendance form alphabetical by the last name and then alphabetically by the first name for people who have the same last name.
🐜 The new next meeting date field had some bugs this month as we rolled it out. In some cases, it was empty for some churches and caused attendance not to generate. In other cases it didn't properly update the date to reflect the group's next meeting date, so attendance wasn't generated.
🐜 Campus staff that has a personal campus that's different than the campuses assigned to them in the team settings will now be able to see and create groups within any campus they have access to in the team settings.
🐜 If you searched for open groups within your internal group list, some full (and thus closed) groups were showing up.
🐜 If someone is both an apprentice leader and group leader, the tab label on their personal profile for this role will always be group leader (or whatever alias you've created for this role). Inside that tab will be all groups the person is a leader and apprentice for.
🐜 On your all notifications page, if you checked the box to indicate you read the notification, it will no longer remove that notification. It was showing an animation to remove it, but upon page refresh, it would re-appear. We'll continue to show all notifications on this page, checked or unchecked.
August 2018 ☀️
🚀You can now add someone's "nickname" and "middle name" to their profile.
🚀(F1) We now sync someone's "nickname/goes by name", "middle name" and "former name" with FellowshipOne. We'll be using these to improve our matching to help prevent duplicates from when people sign up for a group.
🚀When someone fills out the group signup / contact form on their public GroupFinder profile, their form comments will be saved in the "notes" tab for them in the prospects pipeline.
🚀If a group's meeting location is set to "on campus" we now show that on their public GroupFinder profile. It will also show the name of the location. e.g, On Campus: Room 1B
🚀There's a new field in a group's profile edit tab. It's under the Meeting Info section and it's called: Next meeting date. This will be pre-filled with the next logical date the group meets based upon it's meeting time setup. However, you can now override this at any time. This is helpful for cases when a group wants is set to inactive and will become active again. Now, you can set the next meeting date, which will generate attendance for that date.
🚀When sending out an email in the messages area, you now have a new segment called "Group Tags" that will allow you to email people who are associated with a specific group tag. e.g., email all group leaders of groups with the Fall "2018" group tag 🙌
🚀The group "apprentice leader" role will now receive the GroupFinder new sign up email notification for their group.
🚀When a group's meeting time info is changed, that's now shown on the group's timeline.
🚀You can now send emails with a .eps attachment, to send a map location/directions.
🚀You can now send out a mass group roster check! Head over to your groups list page and click on the sub-nav near the top-right. You'll see a new drop-down option to send out the mass roster check. You can send it to all groups, or use the search filters to narrow down to certain types of groups to send it to. We'll even show you which groups won't receive the roster check because there isn't a leader or a leader with an email on file.
🚀You can now see / filter groups based upon their GroupFinder status. There's a new search filter on your groups list page to select the GroupFinder status. Now, you can see groups that are not showing up on the GroupFinder or are hiding their exact location, etc..
🐜Some leaders who had an account were being listed when the search filter "pending account creation" was selected on the leaders list page.
🐜The default date selected in the date selection field on the dashboard is now properly showing "Last 30 Days" instead of "Today"
🐜Fixed an issue where some group "hosts" it was showing them being a a host for 2 or more groups but on their profile, they were just a host for 1 group.
🐜Fixed an issue where some prospects couldn't be dragged to the connected stage if they were already part of another group.
🐜The meeting time is no longer required in order to save changes to a group's info.
🐜We fixed an issue on mobile where the confirmation message to remove someone from a group was partially hidden by the cancel and submit button.
🐜If a group's start date is set to a future date and a prospect fills out the GroupFinder contact form for that group, then when a leader accepts the prospect into the group, the prospect was being immediately added to the Needs Follow-up stage. That doesn't happen anymore 👍
🐜The order of people listed on an attendance report is now alphabetical for people who share the same last name.
🐜(F1) Fixed an issue where guests weren't properly receiving the guest status in GV due to how we handle them with our nightly sync in F1.
July 2018 🇺🇸
🐜Leaders who think they are from the future can no longer select a future date on the attendance form calendar 🕰
🐜Some leaders who were receiving attendance emails are now starting to receive them again. We had a bug with the "require attendance" setting being toggled off that was preventing a small % of leaders from getting the attendance email.
🚀When a group leader goes to their personal profile, they can now see and email their coach within GroupVitals. Under their leader tab (or your custom leader role name), they'll see their coach. Below the coach's name is an email icon. Clicking on that will pull up a window for them to send an email to their coach. The contents of the email isn't stored anywhere, FYI 👀
🚀Mass leader account invites is here! With one click, you can invite all of your leaders to create an account. Just head over to your leader's list page and click the new sub-menu icon at the top-right near the sort-by button and select the send mass invite from the dropdown menu. Read more about how to do that here.
🐜Leaders who are spouses and at once time shared an email, but now don't, will now properly show their account status in the leader search and their person profile.
🚀You can now control which group types you'd like to appear on the public GroupFinder search filter at the top. You can change this via the GroupFinder settings in the add-ons area. This is perfect for any "sensitive" groups. Perhaps you have some recovery groups or kids groups that you just don't want the public to see.
🐜A group will now remain archived if they were manually archived before the end date was reached and if it was set so that the group is made inactive on the end date. This was a really random and rare bug found by a really random and rare user, and we're so glad they found it 😉
🐜Some admins/staff are now no longer receiving duplicate emails for attendance drop notifications. Now they can finally reach inbox zero without having to go through a bunch of emails from us 👏
June 2018 🏖
🚀To prevent email threading and quick scanning in your inbox, the group's name is now in the subject line for all attendance taken notification emails.
🐜(F1) We fixed an issue where some people who were added to a group as a leader, they were showing up in F1 as a member.
🐜The phone number for a new group member will now properly show up in the group leader's new member notification email when a staff member manually adds someone to a group.
🐜If you set someone's DOB to empty, it will now properly save that empty value.
🐜If you turn off/disable certain "group models" in your account settings, the GroupFinder will now show those group models in the search filters.
May 2018
🐜 If a prospect gets accepted into group as a member and then a staff member drags the prospect to the didn’t join, then the prospect will now properly be removed from the group.
🐜(F1) If you add a new person via People > Add Person OR add via a group's profile AND you add a child(ren), that child(ren) is/are now properly sent over to F1.
🐜 If someone is a group leader, host or apprentice leader AND they have a coach AND then you change their leadership role from one to another (like host to leader), then the coach that was assigned to them will now properly stay with the leader in that new role.
April 2018
🚀On the member list page, if you export your members you'll now see the date their record was created and the date they were added to the group.
🐜If you have the setting toggle to ON for leaders to not be able to edit someone's profile, we closed a loop hole where a leader could still edit the person's profile on the group's profile, under previous members, if you click on the drop-down menu > Edit profile link appeared and allowed the leader to edit their info.
🐜 (F1) If someone fills out the group signup form (and need help? form) on the GroupFinder as a new person, their email and phone are added to GV and are now properly pushed over to F1.
March 2018
🚀 (F1) Each time information is updated in GV and is supposed to be updated in F1, that info is now sent to a queue system. Sometimes F1 doesn't accept the info from us the first time, so our new queue system will automatically retry sending that info to F1 up to 3 times. We also store a log of all the information that's in the queue in case we ever need to access it and manually send info over that never made it.
🐜If something goes haywire on the attendance submission form, we've now added a check so that it won't submit the attendance more than once. Sorry for the few folks who got 50+ attendance notification emails from a single group.
🐜If you're a staff member assigned to a specific campus, and your on a group's profile to add a person to their group, the search for people is now no longer limited to just people who are in that staff's campus.
🐜If the admin moves a prospect into the contacted stage AND makes a note at the same time, then that prospect will no longer show up in a random group.
February 2018
🐜(F1) If you clone a group, all the group members will now properly show up in the new group on F1.
🚀We removed the guests role as a filter on the page that lists group members and instead have moved them over to the all people list. This will avoid confusion as guests are not considered group members.
🐜If someone has a period "." in their name, they'll now be properly searchable. Now. Isn't. That. Cool.?
🚀The "reply-to" in the attendance reminder emails is now set to the email set in the church settings.
January 2018
🚀When searching for a group by name and you're using search filters, the results will now only search within your current filtered results 😊
🚀You can now make all of your inactive groups active with a single click 🏆
🐜If someone turns off attendance text reminders, they will no receive the second attendance reminder text.
🐜(F1) A group's meeting end time now properly updates F1 when changed in GV.
🐜(F1) People and groups are now properly syncing over to F1. Click here for more details.
🐜Fixed an issue that wast preventing attendance settings from saving for some churches.
🐜The "New Signups" window list now more accurately reflects the exact # of people that's show in the metric.