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