Introduction to Groups for Leaders

Planning Center Groups is an online application that will help you manage your members, plan events, take attendance, and share resources. As a Group Leader, you can do most of your group management from Church Center, but there are some leader tasks that you’ll need to do from the Admin side of Groups.

The following video shows what leaders can do in Church Center.

 

Note

To manage your group from Church Center, you'll need to be logged in to the Church Center web or app.

Add Members to a Group

You can add members to your group from the Members tab.

When the group member requests to join, review the request to add them as a member.

Create and Manage Events

To create an event in Church Center web or app, log into Church Center, go to the group's Events tab, and select the Actions button in the app or the New button on the web.

Select an event to edit it.

Take Attendance

You can take attendance for a group event from Church Center web or app starting from 10 minutes before the event begins.

Tip

If attendance isn’t something you’re interested in tracking, an Administrator can disable the reminders on the Settings tab.

If you want to add visitors to the attendance list, you can do that from Groups Admin if your group is set up to allow leaders to add members.

Message Members

You can communicate with your group members using Group Messaging in the Church Center web or app.

First, make sure that messaging is enabled for your group and decide whether members can create new messages or only leaders.

Note

If you don't see the Group Messaging section in Settings, you can ask your Admin to give you permissions to enable messaging for your group.

You can then start discussions or post announcements for your group members Church Center.

Administrative Tasks

From the Admin side of Groups, you can do most of the same things that you can do from Church Center, in addition to adding resources, managing settings, and viewing reports.

Note

To manage your group from Groups Admin, you'll need to log in. The first time you log in to Groups Admin, you might need to set a password, depending on if you have previously set a password for one of the other Planning Center products.

The table below shows a list of the administrative tasks that you can do from the Admin side of Groups. Click the link on a task for more information.

Task	Description
Add or invite a member to a group	From the Members tab, you can add or invite new members to a group and also respond to requests to join a group.
Manage and email group members	From the Members tab, you can email or print a list of members, remove or promote a member, and reset the date they joined the group.
Create an event	From the Events tab, you can create and edit an event.
Take attendance	From the Events tab tab, take attendance and add new members or visitors (depending on group settings).
Add resources	From the Resources tab, you can view and add resources for your group members.
Manage group settings	From the Settings tab, group leaders can modify group information such as name, description, and group image, as well as the meeting location and contact information. Leaders can also add tags to help filter groups on Church Center.
View reports	The Overview report will give you a bird's eye view of how your group is doing as a whole. The Attendance report will give you a closer look at the individuals in your group. As you take attendance during your events, this report will begin to populate.

Need Help?

If you need any help as you're leading your group, use the ? in the upper right of any page to contact our Support Team or submit a ticket in our contact form.