VBS Groups

Groups are the crews children spend the week in. Everything else leans on them: rosters, badges, the check-in board’s filter, and — if you run one — the donation competition. Everything about groups happens on one page: Groups in the event sidebar.

The Groups page: a sentence saying how many kids are in a group, a highlighted box listing what still needs attention, and a board with one column per crew — Grace's four crews on the board, with eighteen children between them

Read the top of the page first

The page opens with one sentence — how many kids are in a group out of how many registered. Under it, a highlighted box lists what still needs you, each with the button that fixes it:

kids who aren’t in a group yet
friend requests waiting for a decision
friends who asked to be together but ended up apart
crews with no adult leader
crews holding more kids than their capacity

When the box says nothing needs you, the crews are ready. The number on Groups in the sidebar counts the same things.

Create the crews

Add a group

Add group, top right. Give it a name and a colour — the colour is what a five-year-old actually navigates by, on their badge and on their room sign.

Give it a grade range

Grade Range is optional and does one job: it tells auto assign which children belong here. A crew set to 4th–5th grade only collects 4th and 5th graders. If your VBS registers by age instead of grade, the same field asks for an Age Range.

Cap it, if you need to

Capacity is optional too. Leave it blank for no limit. It counts children only — leaders and helpers never take a slot — and auto assign stops filling a crew once it is full.

Note

Include in Challenge only matters if you are running the donation competition. Leave it on; with no competition running it changes nothing.

Fill them automatically

Auto-assign places everyone who is not yet in a crew. Its options dialog is worth reading rather than clicking past:

Preserve existing groups — keeps every current assignment and only places children who have none. This is what you want as late registrations trickle in.
Start fresh — clears every assignment first and rebuilds from scratch. It undoes any hand-placing you have done.
Also auto-assign volunteers — on by default. Turn it off to keep adults where you put them; the choice is remembered for next time.
Roles to include — unticked roles are skipped, and those volunteers stay unassigned.

Auto-assign keeps confirmed friends together. If some suggested friend matches aren’t confirmed yet, it asks first whether to confirm them or run without them.

The Auto Assign Options dialog offering Preserve existing groups or Start fresh, a volunteers toggle, and a list of roles to include — Preserve keeps your work; Start fresh throws it away. The dialog says which is which.

Move people by hand

The Board shows one column per crew, plus Not in a group for anyone still waiting. Drag a person onto a column to move them. On a phone, press and hold a name before dragging, or use the … menu on any row — it moves people, takes them out of a crew, and sets a leader’s role.

Each child shows their grade, any allergy, and a heart when they have a confirmed friend: a full heart when the friend is in the same crew, a crossed-out one when they are apart.

List shows everyone in one searchable list. Filter by Kids, Volunteers, Not in a group, or a single crew; tick several people and choose Move to… to place them all at once.

Tip

Not in a group is the filter that matters the week before VBS. Anyone still in it arrives on Monday without a crew, a badge, or a leader expecting them.

Every crew needs at least one adult. Volunteers are placed the same way as children, and the job they hold in the crew comes from their role.

Change a crew’s settings

Click a crew’s name at the top of its column. A panel opens beside the board with everything about that crew: name, colour, grade or age range and capacity; its logo, banner, celebration animation and sound for the competition screen; Print for just this crew; and Delete.