Understanding groups

A group gathers learners inside a department. It is the object that decides who receives what, and everything you set up afterwards rests on it. To place groups next to departments and permissions, see Understanding structure and permissions.

What a group gates

A group serves three purposes at once:

• Access to content. A track is distributed to groups, never to individuals. See Model 2: distribution through tracks.
• The analytics perimeter. Statistics filter by group. Without groups that match your populations, you only get account-wide numbers, with nothing to compare.
• Engagement. Notifications, campaigns and leaderboards target groups, and roles are given inside a group. See Roles in a group.

Because the same object carries these three purposes, a group that matches no real population weakens your distribution, your statistics and your animation at the same time.

Belonging to a group is what opens content

To see content as a learner, you must belong to a group that receives some. An administration profile is not enough: it gives no access to learner content. An administrator who belongs to no group sees nothing in the app, whatever their rights.

Group or department

The department walls off administration: each department has its own content, groups, analytics and administrators. The group segments learners inside a department. A group lives in a single department, never across several.

The department models your org chart and decides who administers what. The group describes a population and decides who receives what.

A learner belongs to several groups

A learner belongs to as many groups as needed, and access adds up: they see the union of everything their groups open to them.

That is what lets you cross several logics. Example: a Lyon store group for local distribution, a New joiners group for onboarding and a Managers group for leadership content. The same person can belong to all three.

Static or dynamic

A static group contains whoever you put in it. You add and remove learners by hand.

A dynamic group fills itself from criteria applied to your user fields, and its membership is recalculated when you save the criteria and when a user’s data changes. See Dynamic groups for how criteria are written and when the recompute runs.

Create one group per arrival wave when you want to compare the onboarding of one wave with the next: that comparison cannot be reconstructed after the fact. Use dynamic groups as soon as arrivals are continuous, or as soon as an HRIS feeds your accounts. See Pilot and launch.

How to think about your groups

Design your groups around what you are going to distribute, rather than around your org chart, which departments already carry.

💡 Avoid proliferation. If every distribution has you ticking fifteen groups, you will eventually miss one. A single group that represents a population you target often works better than fifteen groups you have to assemble each time.

The trap: explicit rights lists

A distribution or statistics right can be restricted to a list of groups designated by name. That list does not extend by itself: a group created later is not on it, and the person concerned does not see it. That is where most “I cannot see this group” reports come from. See Who can distribute what.

What a group does not do

• A group does not wall off administration: two groups in the same department share the same administrators. To wall things off, you need a department.
• Belonging to a group gives no rights in the back office. Rights are assigned through a profile or a permission template. See Assigning rights.
• A group does not pick its members on its own, unless it is dynamic or the Self-registration group option is enabled. With that option, learners can join the group themselves when they sign in: the group then receives everything you distribute to it, and you do not control who joins.

Going further

• Creating and organising user groups: the creation screen, the group’s department and the advanced options
• Dynamic groups: automatic assignment criteria: how criteria are written and the traps to avoid
• Roles in a group: team leaders, coaches, validators and animators
• Who can distribute what: distribution rights, including explicit lists