Best Practices for Structuring Group Categories

Why structure matters beyond just organization

Group Categories aren't just a filing system, your Primary and Secondary Group Categories directly power Follow-Up's Group Leader and Both (Smart) auto-assignment modes. A poorly structured category setup shows up later as absentees repeatedly landing in Flagged.

Recommendations

• Choose your most complete, most consistently-led category (often Cell Groups or Shepherding Groups) as Primary, this is checked first for every absentee
• Use a genuinely different category as Secondary, not a near-duplicate of Primary, the point is to catch people the first check missed
• Avoid creating overlapping categories where a member could reasonably belong to two groups in the same category, this creates ambiguity in which leader should be notified

Restructuring categories after Follow-Up auto-assignment has been running for a while can cause a temporary spike in Flagged absentees while the system adjusts to the new structure, plan changes for a quieter period if possible.

Best practice

Map your category structure on paper before creating it in Sermfy, it's much easier to spot an overlap or gap in a sketch than after several dozen groups already exist.