Today, we're excited about the release of an important new feature in Planning Center Groups: the ability to archive groups when they're disbanded or no longer in session.
We've noticed Groups is often being used for classes and seasonal groups which rotate membership on a regular basis. When the class or the quarter has ended, this new feature will let you close down the group while leaving membership records, event history, and attendance data intact.
How Archiving Works
On the group details page, over on the administration side of Groups, there's a new link.
When a group is archived, most of its functionality is disabled:
- The group page isn't visible in the public group directory.
- Leaders can no longer navigate to their group.
- Members, resources, or events can no longer be added.
- Attendance request emails are no longer sent.
- Groups are removed from the default group listing.
Using the filter bar, you can view only active groups, only archived groups, or a combined view of both. The combined view is especially useful if, for example, you want to view attendance records data across an entire group type over time, including groups that are no longer active. When viewing archived groups, it's easy to see when the group was archived and when they last met.
On a member's profile page, you can see see their current group memberships as well as their memberships to archived groups.
Implications for Billing
Planning Center Groups is priced by the number of group members per month. Group members are counted once, even if they belong to many groups. People in archived groups do not count towards this total.
Implications for Planning Center People
Activity History: In People, you can see when someone joins a group, attends an event, or leaves a group. When you archive a group, all that information stays intact.
People Lists: In People, you can build intelligent lists based on group membership. This will still work for archived groups so you can create lists of anyone who was a part of a now-archived group.
List Actions: In People, you can use an "action" to add people to groups in bulk. If the group is archived, you won't see it in the list of target groups.
Unarchiving a Group
A group can be unarchived! In the unarchiving process, the system will check to make sure the group name is unique. If it's not, we'll ask you to change the group name. After all, you most likely don't want active groups with identical names in your public group directory.
We hope this feature makes Planning Center Groups more useful in keeping track of classes and seasonal type groups. Let us know what you think using the in-app help desk or discuss with other customers in Groups' customer Slack channel #product-groups.
Thanks!
~ Team Groups