Building a recipient group

A group is a reusable audience. Build it once and send to it again and again. Groups come in two kinds, and can be organized into a hierarchy.

Create a group

• 1. On Communications → Groups, click New group and give it a name (e.g. "Lectors").
• 2. Choose the kind (set once, at creation):
• Manual list — you add specific people. Use Members to search by name and add or remove each one.
• Segment — a rule that fills itself: choose a field (all parishioners, ministry, engagement, registration, or one per household) and a value (e.g. ministry = lector).
• 3. Optionally set Part of to nest this group under a parent (e.g. "Lectors" under "Liturgical Ministries"). A parent group's sends also reach everyone in its sub-groups, so the parent is a quick way to reach several groups at once.
• 4. Set Who can join (see below) and an optional Description — parishioners see this once self-join is offered.
• 5. Click Preview to see exactly who resolves, with warnings for anyone missing an email or phone.

Why two kinds

A manual list is best for a small, named set. A segment keeps itself current — "all registered households" or "active lectors" updates as your data changes, with no editing.

Groups within groups

Give a group a parent to build a hierarchy — a "Volunteers" parent over "Lectors," "Ushers," and "Hospitality," for instance. Messaging the parent reaches its own people plus everyone in every sub-group beneath it. The Groups tab lists every group as a compact one-line row — chips on each row show its kind (Automatic/Manual), who can join (Open/Approval/Staff-managed), its conversation mode (Announcements/Discussion/Moderated), and its people count — with a search box and four filters above the list. Click a row to open its detail strip, which shows a segment's criteria and how many sub-groups feed into it.

Who can join

Each group has a join policy:
- Staff-managed — only staff add people (the default, and the only option that matters until parishioner self-join is offered).
- Open — parishioners can join instantly.
- By approval — a join request waits in the group's Subscribers panel for staff to approve or decline.

Subscribers

Every group has a Subscribers panel — the record of who has explicitly joined, opted out, or asked to join, separate from a manual list's membership or a segment's live rule. Use it to see and manage:
- Anyone waiting for approval (for a "By approval" group) — approve or decline each request.
- A Subscribe someone search, to add a person directly.
- Everyone else, with a channel preference (both / email / text / none) and an Unsubscribe / Resubscribe button.

Text-to-join keywords

On the new Joining tab you can set up a keyword (e.g. "lectors") that a parishioner will text to the parish number to join that group automatically — no separate confirmation needed, since sending the text is the confirmation. This card is ready to configure now, but stays dormant — marked "activates when texting is wired" — until your parish's texting is fully set up.

Tips

• Preview before every important send so you know the real reach and catch missing contact details.
• People with no email are simply skipped for an email send (and flagged in the preview), never dropped silently.
• A deceased parishioner never appears in a group's preview, count, or send — Vianney excludes them automatically, everywhere a group resolves.
• A group can now also include external email recipients — an email address for someone who isn't in the parish directory. They are email-only (never texted), and how they behave when you combine groups is covered in Sending to several groups.
• Reusable content now lives on its own Template Library tab, where each template carries an approval state and a version history — and a group's welcome template must be approved before Vianney will accept it, so nothing unvetted ever greets a new member. See The Connect Template Library.
• A group that has ever sent a message can never be permanently deleted — its history stays intact — and only a parish administrator can delete a group at all. An administrator can also Archive a group (an admin-only action on the list) to set it aside without deleting anything.
• Building and previewing a group never touches AI — that only comes in at Compose, and only if your parish has it on; see Sending a message with Connect.