How Group Membership Works

We came up with the need for three different types of groups (and membership):

1. Standard groups where someone goes in and adds people (or people request to join) through OneBody
2. Linked groups where membership is based on an outside source, based on a “link code”
3. “Parents of” groups where group membership is actually figured by pulling parents of people (kids) from another group.

For all group types, members can choose to stop receiving email from the group by clicking a simple link within one of the emails or by turning off email from their profile while logged in.

Standard Group

There’s not much to say about this group type, as it works about like you’d expect. The group admin can add and remove people through OneBody. This is done by selecting the group from the Groups view and then clicking the people link showing the number of members in the group. People can also request to join a group themselves by clicking the Join Group button (must be confirmed by a group admin) and choose to leave the group at any time by clicking Leave Group.

Linked Group

Linked groups are useful if you are importing your people database from an outside source that itself has a group/class concept of some kind.

For instance, you may be using a Church Management System as your main database, and it may have its own “groups.” It would be nice to not have to manually put people in the same groups inside OneBody.

The “Classes” Field

One of the fields you can specify when importing data from CSV is the “classes” field. This is a simple text field where you can store unique group ids from your external data source, separated by comma:

100,101,105,109

…or:

abc1,xyz2

You can really put anything in there you want, as long as you separate each code with a comma.

The “Link Code” Field

When editing groups, you may have noticed the “Class Link Code(s)” field. This is a space to enter one or more codes from the “classes” field we talked about above. When this field contains something, membership in that group is said to be “linked,” meaning it is automatically managed by the system, based on data passed in through data synchronization (and available in the “classes” field).

“Parents Of” Group

If you select a group for the “Parents of” field when editing a group, then membership in that group is automatically generated based on pulling parents of kids/youth from the selected group.