Small Groups

Groups 2.0

tgrace — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:17:24 GMT

I saw that the dynamic Church Conference is hosting Groups 2.0 Classes. It says that Groups 2.0 will revolutionize the way we do small groups and how weblink interfaces with it. From the site: “It's a completely different paradigm from the previous Small Groups model and represents the future of Groups in Fellowship One”

Is there any more information on it: screenshots, blogs, staging environments etc? I would love to see how Small Groups are changing in F1.

Todd

How to tracking Small Groups stuffs now that we're using Weblink?

ehicks — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:24:13 GMT

OK - so we just started using Weblink for our Small Groups, and our Small Group's Pastor would like to see who's accessing the sight, who's keeping track of attendence, what notes are being provided in the Weblink Group Manager, etc.

How do I get him that info? Are there good reports to use? Or is there a querry that is used for it? How does he go into F1 and find that info?

Any help would be most...helpful!

Thanks!

Erica

E-mail group leader when someone signs up

mng — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:02:36 GMT

I'm wondering if there's a function where when a person signs-up in the contact form, that an email will be sent to the respective group leaders to inform them that to contact the enquirer?

My understanding is (tell me if I'm wrong) the contact will only show up if and when the group leader signs into the Group Manager section and into 'view contact'?

Surely there's a more efficient way of doing it. But what? Any suggestions/ help will be appreciated!

Cheers.

Michael

Posting and Editing Attendance

dmcgill — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:01:08 GMT

This is related specifically to an issue that occurred recently where a connect host attempted to post attendance for a particular activity date and it wouldn’t allow him to select the correct date. Then for some reason they began posting the same attendance for three dates in the future which is incorrect and obviously skews any kind of reporting being done on that attendance. I had read in another post that attendance could not be edited but this definitely seems like something that should be available especially when you have a large number of people posting attendance, there are bound to be mistakes from time to time.

Are there any plans to allow for editing of attendance and I would also be interested in looking into why attendance couldn’t be posted on that particular day thus causing the issue above in the first place.

Tracking Small Group Data

ksanford — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:29:32 GMT

I am interested to know if there is a way to track small group data within Fellowship. For example, I'd like to be able to track the date of when a group starts (month & year) and then also when it ends. We form new small groups at 3 times during the year and it'd be really helpful to track start/end dates to determine how long these groups are lasting. It's not a 'win' for us as a church to just get a large number of people in groups. We want those groups to succeed and continue on past their initial 2 months together.

How can that be tracked within F1? I think it's important.

On a similar note, I'd also like to know if there is a way to track how many groups a person has been a part of. Do people in F1 have unique identifiers assigned to them (groups too actually?)? We see some of the same people cycling through different groups and i'd like to track this as well. How can we track the # of small groups someone has been a part of (especially b/c when you remove them from a group, there is no record they were ever in it?)

Thanks!

Managing Small Group Studies

cshelton — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:21:16 GMT

Our church has a bookstore where members/life group attenders purchase their study materials for their groups. We would like to be able to store in F1 the name of the study that each group is going through. When a life group member goes into the bookstore to purchase their life group study, if they don't know the name of the study, the bookstore person could run a query or report in F1 to find out what study each group is in. Does anyone have any ideas of where we could store this information to attach it to a life group? Thanks for any input you can give!!! :)

E-mail group leader when someone signs up

mng — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:02:36 GMT

I'm wondering if there's a function where when a person signs-up in the contact form, that an email will be sent to the respective group leaders to inform them that to contact the enquirer?

My understanding is (tell me if I'm wrong) the contact will only show up if and when the group leader signs into the Group Manager section and into 'view contact'?

Surely there's a more efficient way of doing it. But what? Any suggestions/ help will be appreciated!

Cheers.

Michael

Managing Small Group Assignments

Alisha — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 21:36:25 GMT

Fellow F1ers,

We are at Park Community Church are in the early stages of implementing F1 and with that comes a lot of patience in figuring out how to use this tool to the fullest potential. We are beginning to manage our Small Groups and it's occured to us that we need to know some best practices.

We are wondering if churches out there are removing an individual's participant assignment when they are no longer in a small group? We discovered that removing the participant assignment deletes record that the individual was ever in a small group and while we do want to remove the assignment, we also do want to maintain record that the individual was in a small group so we can keep track of where our people have been for assimilation purposes.

Let me know if you have encountered this.

Many thanks,

Alisha Rylander

Unique Identifier for Small Groups Other than Leader Name

bmyers — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:24:31 GMT

We've been doing Small Groups for quite a while now, managing them manually. We have set up a test bed of about 40 groups at one of our campuses. Here's where we are:

We have a Ministry called "Life Groups"
In that ministry, we've created an activity called "Life Groups"
For now, we've set up a generic schedule that is every day from 5:00am - 11:30pm (we'll come back and set more specifics later)
We've set up activity groups - one for each of our four campuses
We've named each group according to the group Leader and NOT assigned a room since they meet in homes, not on our campuses
We've set up jobs for the Life Group Leaders
We've added leaders to those jobs

While we've not yet implemented it so far as having leaders manage through weblink, here's our challenge. Look at step 5. We don't want to name the group according to Leader because leaders change. The group may have shared leadership (in my group, I teach some and another member teaches some). Is there another way to build a unique, meaningful identifier name for the group so that if the leader changes or is shared, we don't have to rebuild everything again?

Also, looking at our overall process, do you see any problems with how we've done it up to this point?

Question on best practices

Snichols — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:04:03 GMT

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

Celebrate Recovery

rgilbert — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 20:26:37 GMT

We have not been using FellowshipOne for this program until we had other ministries in place. Now that we are ready to include this ministry I am not sure of all the ways that F1 can be used to help them. They are not really on board with this system right now. If there is anyone who knows all the advantages of using FellowshipOne for Celebrate Recovery please pass the information along so we can get started. Thank you!

Updating Small Group Information for a New Season

amy.anderson — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:25:28 GMT

We are getting ready to kick off the fall season for small groups, so I'm gathering all the updated information from small group leaders to process. Some groups are continuing very similar to last year, some groups are changing leaders, some groups are ending, and some new groups are starting.

What is the best way to track in Fellowship One what information is 2007 data and what information is 2008 data...besides just printing off a spreadsheet and crossing names off the list when I get their new information?

I've considered using notes or contacts, but I'd like to make it easy to search for those who have not responded, ideally to send them a group e-mail with the form attached. Would you attach a year to the staffing assignment and update that when the new info comes in?

Suggestions?

Thanks for your help.

Can images be uploaded to the group manager page?

cshelton — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:15:42 GMT

I was wondering if it is possible to upload an image to be used on the group manager for small groups?

Questions-Small Groups Best Practices

akinne — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:43:31 GMT

Hi! We are in the beginning stages of using F1 and are trying to determine best practices for many areas and ministries. The one that has recently become my responsibility is our small group ministry. I would really like to start us out doing things the most efficient way, so I have some questions regarding how others are tracking their small groups in F1:

Do you track small groups by creating participant assignments for group members or do you use the Groups feature to create small groups?
We currently have RLCs set up for each small group, so I have done participant assignments for one group and have tried to find a report that will show me the information I need to see. Are there any reports that anyone has found to work well for small groups? I would like to find a report that would show me the ages of group members and if they have any children...this could help out tremendously with placing new people in groups.

If anyone has any other tips for working with a Small Groups ministry in F1, I would appreciate all the imput I can get.

Thanks!

Anne

Southbridge Fellowship

Small Groups and Multiple Campuses

Sherryd — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:14:41 GMT

Can anyone give me some insight on how to set up F1 for Small Groups that originate from multiple campuses. A request has been made to add a ministry for each section of our small groups for our north campus and for our south campus. So, I would set up F1 with ministries like:Couples - North, Couples - South, Singles - North, Singles - South.

Is this how you would do it or can you give me some ideas on a simpler way to handle this? We will have a volunteer handling all the data entry for north and one for south.

Creating Maps for small groups

twilliamson — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:02:23 GMT

At the F1 Conference a few months ago, there was a rumor going around about a church who had setup a system to create maps using FellowshipOne data through a google or mapquest type of output. I'm very interested in finding out how to do this. We are in the process of changing our small groups (home groups) to be neighborhood focused rather than affinity focused and would like to have maps of each of our groups. I'd rather not do this manually, though I have created a few maps through google maps - a very nice feature. But it'd be a lot easier to somehow input data automatically compiled in F1 into one of these maps programs and come up with a map, just like that. Does anyone have any ideas or know which church has already done this that I could get in contact with them? Thanks.

Introducing Small Group Manager to Leaders

jlandon — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:05:42 GMT

Hey everyone,

Our church is getting ready to implement the small group manager so that all of the groups can post attendance, manage rosters and such on their own. Currently we have about 24 groups. Does anyone have any experience going through this process who could give me tips on the best way to execute this?

Thanks,
Jeff Landon
jeff@xpointe.com
407-301-7068

Small Group meeting on-line

Marion Lorence — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 19:46:37 GMT

I am the Grace Church staff director of Small Groups. This fall, I am going to begin a new small group which I hoped would meet together for 6 sessions, adjourning before Thanksgiving. The description follows…

Internet Outreach Action Group

When: Thursdays bi weekly beginning September 14 7:00 am

Where: Starbucks (Address in my area)
Other info: Tech savvy and/or writers welcome. truthmedia.com, webevangelism.com, cybermissions.org, ied.gospelcom.net

Have you been thinking about how the Internet could be used to “Go into all the world…”? With over 1000 million people already online, the potential for outreach is staggering. This is a day of opportunity! Join this internet study group as we discover the ideas that are already being effectively used to seek and save the lost. Make new friends and be inspired to bring your faith to life by using what has become an effective connector to the whole world.

Contact: Marion Lorence at (my contact info)

As it turns out, the 3 people who have shown an interest in this group live long distances from one another so will not be able to physically meet together before work on Thursday mornings. I am thinking that we may be able to meet on-line.

Questions? Would this forum be a good location to set up those meetings? Should I make my own SG web site for my meetings? I am looking at goteamspeak.com options as well… Or would just e-mail connections on a distribution list work best for this group.

Any feedback and experience from others on this idea would be greatly appreciated.

For an audience of one,
Marion Lorence