New Features in an Extension for Civi Groups

If you want to see how a group has grown over time or view your Civi groups in their hierarchy, check out the new Groups Extension.

Like many organisations, Woodlands Church uses Civi groups extensively. We have groups which are mailing lists but many of our Civi groups are real groups of people who meet together week by week and group attendance is a significant indicator of engagement with the church. With well over one hundred groups in the city we cluster our groups by location and use the Civi groups hierarchy to reflect this.

Until now there hasn’t been an easy way to view Civi groups in their hierarchy but a new extension makes this possible, showing the groups hierarchied by their ‘parent’ group. Totals are shown for both child and parent groups and it’s also possible to quickly see members by clicking on a particular group.

Another great feature of this extension is the ability to see the growth or decline of a group over time. When you click on a group a graph appears at the bottom of the view showing membership changes. This doesn’t currently have a timescale on it but we’re working on that in the coming months.

In the future we’d love to develop the ability to report on groups, in a way similar to Civimember. Who’s new to the group this month/year? Who has left? This sort of reporting has all sorts of use cases, whether tracking the popularity of groups, the effectiveness of different leaders or the outcome of a local campaign. It will be of use to the many organisations who want to track changes but like the simplicity of groups rather than the complexity of Civimember when you’re dealing with hundreds of different entities as we are.

Thanks to our developer James for working on this extension. We hope you find it useful. Feel free to give us feedback.