A group is a bundle of access with people in it. Put someone in the group and they get everything the group can reach, immediately and from then on.
Assign access to groups, put people in groups, and you never again have to remember which eighty people were supposed to get the new course.
The group every member is in
At the top of the list sits All members, marked System. The platform creates it for you, and everybody on your member list joins it automatically. People you add by hand are in it at once; people who arrive through an import or a purchase follow within a few minutes. Someone who leaves your member list leaves the group too.
Give this group a course, a hub or a calendar and everybody has it, including everyone who joins later. It has no settings of its own, it cannot be deleted, and it does not appear when you pick groups for a single member, because nobody needs to be put in it by hand.
Creating one
A group needs a name, and it is worth giving it an icon and a colour as well: you will be picking it from lists for a long time, and colour makes that instant.
The description is for your team, not for members.
Giving it access
Open the group and add what it should carry: courses, hubs, community forums and badges, calendars and events.
The list page shows these counts per group, so you can see at a glance what each one hands out without opening it.
Add a course to the group later and everybody in the group has it that same moment.
Putting people in
Three routes lead into a group.
- By hand, from the group or from a member's profile.
- At creation or import, where the group is one of the things you assign. The bulk action Add Access on the member list does the same for people who already exist.
- By purchase, if you connect the group to a product.
Filling a group by purchase
You make this connection on the product, not on the group. Open the product, go to Access, pick Groups, and add the group there.
Somebody buys the product, they are added to the group and hold everything it carries. Refund the order and they are removed again.
The group shows a Paywall block in its Membership settings that lists the products filling it. That block is a read-only summary, and it only appears once at least one product points at the group.
The product decides what someone bought, the group decides what that unlocks, and neither needs your attention afterwards.
Keep the group about access, not about marketing. "Premium members" is a good group. "People who opened the June newsletter" is a tag.
Membership limits
A group can carry a Member limit: the number of people it can hold. Leave it empty for no limit.
Useful for a cohort, a coaching round, or anything sold as a limited number of places. When the group is full, nobody else goes in by hand, through an import or through the bulk action Add Access. Those people are simply not added.
The limit does not stop a purchase. A buyer of a product that fills the group still lands in it, even past the limit. If you sell a limited number of places, stop selling the product once the group is full.
Memberships that expire
Under Auto-expire memberships, a group can also expire its memberships. Set how long a membership lasts after someone joins, in days, weeks, months or years, and people leave the group by themselves when their time is up.
Leave everything at zero and memberships never expire.
This is the clean way to run access for a fixed period, such as a year of membership or a twelve-week programme, without a calendar reminder to remove people by hand.
Its own dashboard
With Override the default dashboard, a group points its members at a hub of your choosing as their start page. Different audiences then arrive on different start pages without anyone choosing anything.
Removing someone
Take someone out of a group and everything the group carried goes with them. Access they hold directly, assigned to them personally, stays.
That distinction is worth remembering when access does not disappear the way you expected.