Advantages and best practices for reusing groups to manage consistently offered classes and events
Rather than creating a new group each time you have a recurring event like a New Member's class or summer Youth Camp, we recommend reusing the original group and registration. Here are three advantages to doing this:
- Keeps the number of groups in your account more manageable.
- Easy to use or slightly adjust Registration Settings from the last class or event.
- Attendance allows you to see a longer term picture of involvement in the class or event.
Here are some best practice suggestions:
- Use the group to capture registrations for the upcoming class or event.
- Once complete, click the Reports (Blue) > Meetings > + Add Meeting and capture attendance for everyone who attended in the case of a class & everyone who registered in the case of an event.
- Class: Back in the group, select the names of all who attended. For a member attribute that needs updated like "Date Completed New Member's Class", click the green Action button and select "Update Member Data" to update that field for everyone at once. Then Remove or Transfer them out of the group. Those who did not attend are still enrolled in the group and can be invited to the next class.
- Event: From within the group select everyone in the event, then under the green Action button select to remove everyone. This leaves the group empty and ready to be used again. If a payment was required, you will be prompted to clear the registration data. In most cases, this is the action you will want to take to make sure payments from previous events aren't applied to future ones. The group is now ready to be tweaked and used again for the next event.
- Same class, multiple registrations: You will need to use multiple groups if you have instances of the same class being used for registration at the same time. But, once one of these classes is completed, use the above procedure to re-use it in the future.