New: Confidential member groups

Small groups are great for communities of people in your church where the members are open to sharing and doing life together. However, many churches also have specialized recovery groups to help individuals heal from addiction, grief, and other challenges that desire confidentiality. In these cases, members may need to remain anonymous to each other, with only the leaders seeing the member list.

To support these special groups, we are excited to announce the release of the new Confidential member groups feature!

How does it work?

Admin Setting

• Navigate to the Groups Settings page
• In the Availability on Church Center section, there is a new Member privacy area
• Check the box on Make member list confidential

This will make each member’s personal information (Name, profile photo, email, phone) confidential from other members in the group. With this setting, chat will also be disabled to maintain member-to-member privacy.

Group Type Managers and Groups Administrators have access to this setting.

What does it look like on Church Center? 

On the Church Center side, when groups have this setting turned on, Members are confidential badges will display for people to know they have special member confidentiality settings.

Once members join the group, they will not see any member information in the group, but will still have the leader details so they can know who is leading the group, and can contact them if needed.

Leaders will still see the member details so they can fully care for the group, and a callout will show, reminding them that the members are kept confidential from each other.

For further protection, if an admin enables then disables the Make member list confidential setting, all member info will remain hidden, including the members’ names. Members would have to opt-in to share any of their info with other members.

Expand your care to more people through groups

We know this has been a top feature request in Groups, and we are so excited to add it! Expanding Groups to support these special confidential member groups can help your church expand their reach and properly care for these special sets of people. If you have any feedback on this feature or other thoughts and ideas we’d love to hear from you by clicking on the (?) icon in the top right corner of Planning Center.

🧡 Team Groups