Bluebird Basics: Groups
Groups are the #1 tool that allows your Attendees to have a customized event experience. They're most useful in the Agenda, but can be used elsewhere to help you create an event that can be everything your Attendees need — and nothing they don't!
In this article, we'll talk about:
- Why Groups are useful
- How to make new Groups
- How to assign Attendees to Groups
- How to assign Groups to Agenda Sessions
Groups: Why are they useful?
Groups are used by Bluebird to customize the app experience for each Attendee. If an Attendee is in a Group, they will only be served content you've designated for that Group.
Public Content
If something is not assigned to ANY group, it is considered public content! This means EVERY attendee will see it.
This is felt most powerfully in the Agenda, where it's important that each Attendee knows where to go, and when. Seeing everyone's schedule, even those sessions that they aren't invited to, would be confusing and unnecessary. So we can use Groups to help!
Groups At Work: The Agenda
Say I have three teams: East Coast, West Coast, and Central. My Agenda for the first day of my event features a General Session, followed by a Break, followed by Workshops for each team.
Without the use of Groups, my Agenda might look like this:
[shot of all agenda events in a row]
This isn't ideal — if I'm in the West Coast team, I have to sift through all three Workshops to see which room I'm supposed to report to at 3pm!
We can use Groups to clean this up and personalize this user's Agenda:
[shot of cleaned-up Agenda]
So, how do we get started?
Creating a New Group
To create a new Group, open the Groups page in Bluebird Admin and select Create A New Group
The Create A New Group screen will pop up:
Name your Group, and leave "Is It A Track" set to "No" for now.
Assigning Attendees to Groups
When you save your Group, you'll be taken to that Group's Settings page. Here, you can, populate your Group with Attendees:
To add one or more Attendees, click the checkbox next to their name on the "Excluded" side, and then click the right-facing arrow in the center to move them to the "Included" side.
Any Attendees you see listed in the "Included" side are now members of your Group! 💅
IS It A Track, Though?
Tracks are a type of Group used by the Agenda. If your Attendees are going to be invited to multiple itineraries, they can use Track Filters to compare them all at once. This is common if, for example, you want to offer Attendees the choice between "Outdoor Activities" and "Indoor Activities," or any other competing offerings. We'll get into more details about Tracks later!
Assigning Groups to Sessions
You'll find a number of places in the Bluebird Admin that allow you to assign Groups to a Session, piece of media, or object. The panel to assign Groups to Sessions very closely resembles the tool used to assign Attendees to Groups:
Much like the way we added Attendees to Groups, we can now check the boxes on any Groups along the Excluded column, and then click the right-facing arrow button in the center, to add Groups to the "Included" column. Then, the Group(s) will be added to the Session or object!