Contact Groups serve as a powerful tool within an officiating organization, enabling administrators, schedulers, and officials to create and manage sub-groups of officials with ease. These groups streamline various aspects of your organization's operations and enhance communication and coordination. As the creator of a Contact Group, you have control over its visibility and permissions, ensuring that the right individuals can access and edit the group as needed.
Creating and Editing Contact Groups
To create or edit a Contact Group, navigate to the Members Directory page from the main navigation menu and select "Contact Groups" from the top toolbar. Once in the Contact Groups section, you can effortlessly manage the creation, customization, and organization of your groups.
Exclusive Membership for Officials
Contact Groups are designed exclusively for officials within your officiating organization. Other user types, such as Coaches, Athletic Directors, League Personnel, or Location Personnel, cannot be members of Contact Groups. This exclusive membership ensures that your groups are tailored to the needs of officials, allowing for seamless communication and coordination.
Practical Use Cases for Contact Groups
Filtering: Contact Groups serve as a valuable filtering tool, allowing you to refine directory searches and generate reports with specific subsets of officials. By selecting a Contact Group, you can ensure that the results include only the members of that particular group, facilitating targeted communication and analysis.
Scheduling: When scheduling games, meetings, or other events, Contact Groups provide an efficient way to filter the list of eligible officials. By using a Contact Group, you can easily view and manage the availability and suitability of officials within the chosen sub-group.
Qualifications Management: Control access to specific game types, levels, or positions by using Contact Groups. By assigning qualifications to particular positions, you can ensure that only members of those groups are eligible to work certain leagues, game types, or positions.
Efficient Email Communication: Treat Contact Groups as email distribution lists, simplifying the process of communicating with specific subsets of officials. Whether it's for important announcements, updates, or reminders, Contact Groups expedite the email communication process.
Contact Group Privacy, Permissions, and Sharing
By default, Contact Groups are only visible and editable by the user who created them. They are not owned or managed by the officiating organization. If you wish to share a Contact Group with other users, allowing them to view, access, use, or edit the group, you can customize the group's sharing permissions accordingly. This ensures that the right individuals have the necessary access to optimize collaboration and coordination. To edit these settings, navigate to the Members Directory and choose the Contact Groups option from the top toolbar. Then, select the edit option for the group you want to edit and adjust the sharing settings within the Contact Group.
Contact Group Ownership
Contact Groups are the property of the original user that created the Contact Group. Contact Groups are not owned, controlled, or the property of any officiating organization, and administrators of officiating organizations do not have universal or unrestricted control over Contact Groups. Contact Group creators may choose to share read-only access with other users, and/or they can share edit access with other users as they desire, including administrators of an officiating organization if desired. Contact Groups can be powerful tools used for both private and public reasons, so for that reason, the software assumes that the Contact Group should be private and restricted only to the creator unless the creator specifies otherwise.
Contact Group Ownership Transfer
If edit permission on a contact group is provided to a user that has Administrator permissions within an officiating organization, the user with Administrator permissions can takeover ownership of a Contact Group. To do so, the administrator should navigate to the Members Directory and select the Contact Groups option from the top menu. They should then select the Edit option for the contact group they wish to take ownership of and then use the "Take Ownership" option to claim and take over ownership of the Contact Group. It's important to note that this is the only available method to takeover ownership of a Contact Group that another user created. If the original creator of the Contact Group has not granted edit permissions to their group, then no other user may takeover or claim ownership of their Contact Group.