As Personify works to develop next generation e-business capabilities, one of the areas of importance is the ability for one constituent to manage the demographics, relationships, and transactions for other constituents that are part of a group. This is known as Group Management and it is composed of Corporate and Staff Management, Committee Management, and Chapter Management. The Group Management controls allow you to assign a manager to a roster from the back office and allows him/her to manage the roster online using these controls. This person is known as a "group manager". This feature is particularly useful for chapters, committees, or trade associations.
Customers themselves can represent a segment. On the web, this person is known as the "Group Manager", which is the person assigned to manage a segment or group of people. The permissions you assign to a group manager determine what customer record management functions he/she can perform on the web using the Group Management controls.
Some organizations designate chapter managers from outside the organization, so the responsibility for the health of their chapters does not fall on staff. Most of the major features of Group Management are available to chapter managers: the ability to view a group’s profile page, to view/search a roster, to drill into an individual’s record, and to place a group order/registration. However, managers do NOT have control over who is in the chapter. Members are added and removed based on membership orders, not manual actions. Therefore, chapter managers cannot add or remove someone to/from a chapter.
A critical part of a manager’s duties is to monitor and react to metrics that indicate chapter health. Chapter managers have the ability to run reports on the web in order to manage chapter health and help managers understand if their chapter is growing, shrinking, etc.
Communication with chapter members is a significant part of a manager’s duties. Managers may send group emails about issues of interest (e.g. new legislation), they may send invitations and reminders to register for various events (e.g. chapter meetings). Welcoming new members and reaching out to members in danger of lapsing are also critical communications.
Chapter managers are also frequently in touch with the chapter officers. In Personify360, chapter officers are managed through a committee. In order to give chapter managers easy access to contact information about committee officers from the same online chapter management interface, organizations should give manager rights of the chapter committee to the chapter manager.
In Personify360 Operations, chapters are set up by creating subgroups.
As of 7.5.2, on the Segmentation Control (ORG002) screen, a new segment rule based on the customer type "Subgroup" has been created. This allows you to create subgroups that are comprised of members with active orders for one or more designated membership products linked to the subgroup record . For example, your Midwest Chapter may actually be comprised of the following three membership products: Midwest Professionals, Midwest Students, and Midwest Retirees. In the past, group managers were assigned by product, so they could not view and analyze all chapter members together. With the 7.5.2 release, these three memberships can be combined into a single subgroup and the subgroup can be defined as a segment. A group manager assigned to that chapter segment can see professionals, students, and retirees in one place. If your organization has this type of distinction, but wants to continue to manage them separately, then you can create a subgroup for each product. These subgroups can become segments and each can be assigned a different group manager.
In order to work with chapters on the web, you must first set up a chapter for segmentation. Then, you can assign an individual to be a group manager to the chapter. Finally, you need to configure the Group Management controls on your e-Business website.