Experience.FellowshipOne.com

We have been using Fellowship One for a while, but only recently moved our small group management from Church Teams to Fellowship One. This has not worked quite as well as I had hoped. I suspect I need to rethink how I set things up and I am looking for suggestions and/or best practices.

 What I set up is:

•  A "Small Groups" ministry
• A "Small Groups" Activity
• An RLC for each group
• Appropriate properties for each group (RLC) for display in the Small Group Finder
  
• A schedule for this activity. Since we have 41 small groups, and these meet on different days of the week and at different times, I ended up having to just create a schedule which repeats for each day of the week. 

 

The above worked fine for our sign-up phase, but is not working very well for administration. For example, a few of these groups meet on our main campus and want to use our check-in stations to track attendance and to print name tags. While I can specify which groups (RLCs) are visible in check-in, I cannot specify different schedules for each group (RLC), and all "visible" groups (RLCs) will always show up on the check-in screen, even if they are not meeting that day. (The only issue for those groups which are using the Small Group Manager to post attendance is that they can select posting dates which do not really match when they held their meetings. That is, the drop down list contains an entry for every day of the week regardless of group.)

 

 I could have created a separate activity for each group, but that would have made the Small Group Finder unusable. It would also complicate collecting overall attendance information (via reports).

 

So, what should I have done?

 

Steve

What you have done sounds like what we have done as well.  However, you have to specify that everyone use group manager to keep track of attendance.  You can't have some doing check-in and some doing group manager.  It all needs to be the same.

Hey! I just read your post and saw that you transferred from Church Teams to Fellowship for your small groups.  I'd love to know your reasoning behind doing this as I've contemplated the opposite- moving our small groups from Fellowship into Church Teams which seems to be more small group friendly. 

I agree that Church Teams seems more small group friendly. We moved from Church Teams to FellowshipOne because:

 

1. We were already using Fellowship One (and thus already paying for it) for other purposes
2. We wanted to have one database with names, addresses, etc. and thus only one copy to update, as well has having information on which group(s) an individual is in as part of their Fellowship One data.
   
3. I determined that with enough effort, I could duplicate most of the function of Church Teams. This involved writing my own code to automatically send out e-mail reminders (with a link to the appropriate Small Group Manager web site) to post attendance, etc. I also had to set up the appropriate questions to be answered when posting attendance.

We moved 42 small groups to Fellowship One this fall. So far it has been working OK for us. 

Steve