Frequently Asked Question About FellowshipOne For Groups

A Group is what Fellowship One calls any collection of people that come together at the church on a regular basis. At First Church, each of our committees, governing bodies, small group ministries, and ongoing adult programs is a Group.

Groups have leaders and members. Group leaders and members can use Fellowship One to see who belongs to their group and connect with others in the group.

Using Fellowship One helps you and helps the church – at the same time!

With Fellowship One, you can see a list of all the members of your group with their latest contact information. You can send emails to everyone in the group, or just a subset of people. (No more email snafus!) You can download a list of people in your group. You can add people, remove people and invite people to your group.

Did you know that there are almost 70 different groups at First Church? That’s a lot of groups for our church keep track of!

When you use Fellowship One to manage your group it helps the church maintain an up-to-date view of our groups and members. This picture of the church helps us enormously as we seek to foster community, boost volunteerism, and build stewardship.

If you don’t have an account yet, you can create an account.

You can always get to Fellowship One from the First Church website. Go to uubelmont.org and click Our Church / Membership / Fellowship One. Want to go straight there now? Here’s the link for Fellowship One. Once you’re there, we recommend creating a bookmark in your browser for easy access.

To see Groups that you lead (and belong to):

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click “Your Groups” from the list or click the “Groups” tab in the upper left hand corner of the page.

• Click on a group that you lead. You’ll see 4 tabs that let you do all sorts of things. Try them out and see what you can do. Don’t worry, you won’t break it.

Yes, you can.

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click Your Groups

• Click the name of the Group

• Click the Roster tab at the top

• On the right there is a list of Actions you can take in the Roster section.

  • Click Download CSV for an Excel-readable file (and you can choose the fields you want in the file)

  • Click Download PDF for a pretty presentation including photos and general contact information

There are three ways to add members to your Group:

• Add someone to the Group

• Invite someone to join the Group

• Wait for someone to ask to join

• To Add or invite someone to join the Group

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click Your Groups

• Click the name of the Group

• On the right, under Actions, click Add/Invite someone to Join

• If a person is known to be in the Group, then simply add them to the Group.

• If you Invite someone to the Group, that person becomes a Prospect. They are sent an email which includes instructions for registering for Fellowship One. They can then accept the invitation and will become a member or the group and are added to the roster.

• When someone asks to join they also become a Prospect. You can approve or reject their request. If you approve, they then have to accept your approval to become a member and be added to the roster.

If someone is no longer a member of the group, they can be removed from the Roster.

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click Your Groups

• Click the name of the Group

• Click the Roster tab

• Click the name of the person to be removed

• On the right, under Actions, click Remove From Group

Inviting someone to the group makes them a prospect and they get an e-mail which includes instructions for registering for Fellowship One. They can then accept the invitation and will become a member of the group and are added to the roster.

Adding someone to the group skips the prospect stage. They become a member and are added to the roster. They will not receive an e-mail inviting them to register for Fellowship One. Your group members can always sign up for a Fellowship One account if they don’t yet have one.

Yes, you can. You can email everyone in the Group, or select which people to email.

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click Your Groups

• Click the name of the Group

• On the right, under Actions, click Send an email to the group.

• Choose “Send an email to everyone in the group” or “Let me choose which people to email”

• Type in your Subject and your Message

• You can include a link in your email by pasting in the URL (you can’t make it pretty, but the link will work when people receive the email)

• You can attach a file to your email with the “Attach a file” link at the bottom of the screen

• At the bottom of the screen, click “Send email now”

As long as group members appear in your Roster, they will receive all emails that you send to the Group. They don’t need to have a Fellowship One account to receive your emails. While we hope everyone at the church will sign up for an account we realize that some people may choose not to and that’s OK.

When you send an email to your Group, the email comes from fellowshiponemail@activenetwork.com, with a “reply to” that uses the email address you use with Fellowship One, e.g.

from: Joe Kelly <fellowshiponemail@activenetwork.com>
reply-to: Joe Kelly.02478@gmail.com

When group members reply to your email, their reply will go to the email address you use with Fellowship One.

If people in your Group are not receiving your emails, they should check their Spam and Promotions folders to make sure that fellowship one emails are not going to Spam.

We know that this is a feature that would be useful to have in some circumstances.

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Reply All is not possible because Fellowship One emails do not include the email addresses of the other recipients.

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This has its pros and cons. On the plus side, it is a privacy feature that reduces unwanted dissemination of personal email addresses. (Ever gotten into trouble because you were supposed to use bcc and forgot?) On the minus side, it means that group members who receive the email cannot send a reply all to the whole group.

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Group members can still send a reply to the sender and this is sometimes sufficient (and even more appropriate than a Reply All). If group members want to send an email to the whole Group, they can always do that by by going into Fellowship One themselves and emailing the Group.

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An alternative approach, that will enable “Reply All” and still allow you to use the latest Fellowship One email addresses for your Group members, is to download the emails from Fellowship One and then paste them into your regular email client, e.g. Gmail, Outlook, etc.

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We also realize that Fellowship One does not support the “Send email to the group” option in the mobile version of its website. This would be a nice feature and we have suggested it to their product team.

We know that recording attendance can feel a bit “Big Brother” for us UUs. But when you record attendance at your meetings it helps the church understand how individuals are involved in the life of the church. This picture of the church helps us enormously as we seek to foster community, boost volunteerism, and build stewardship.

Fellowship One makes this easy! Following a scheduled meeting of your Group, Fellowship One will send you an email reminder to Post Attendance.

• Click the link in the reminder email.

• Select the check box beside each person who attended.

• Click Save attendance.

(If your Group didn’t meet, you can select Did Not Meet and then Save Attendance.)

Yes, you can.

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click Your Groups

• Click the name of the Group

• Click on the Attendance tab

• Choose the attendance date

• Click Edit Attendance in the upper right corner

• Edit the attendance as needed

• Click Save Attendance

Not currently. At present, there is not a way to send automatic meeting reminders for regularly scheduled meetings. However, if you change the scheduled date or time of a meeting, you have the option of notifying your Group members of the change.

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click on Your Groups

• Click the name of the Group

• Click on the Dashboard tab (you may already be there)

• On the right, under Actions, click View Settings

• Click Edit schedule or Edit location.

• Edit the schedule or location.

• Under “Notify the Group?”, choose whether or not to notify the Group of the change in schedule or location.

• Click Save schedule or Save location.

You can record attendance for a special or ad hoc meeting.

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click Your Groups

• Click the name of the Group

• Click on the Attendance tab

• Click Enter Attendance

• Under “Post attendance for Group meeting on…”, choose “Add your new event”

• Select the date and time of your ad hoc meeting

• Select the check box beside each person who attended

• Click Save Attendance

You have the option of indicating that your group didn’t meet.

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click Your Groups

• Click the name of the Group

• Click on the Attendance tab

• Click on Enter Attendance

• Choose the date of the missed meeting and check the Did Not Meet box.

• Enter a reason for why you didn’t meet (this is a required field).

If your Group met on a different date than regularly scheduled, you can add attendance for that date.

• Go to Fellowship One

• Click Your Groups

• Click the name of the Group

• Click on the Attendance tab

• Click Enter Attendance

• Under “Post attendance for Group meeting on…”, choose “Add your new event”

• Select the date and time of your ad hoc meeting

• Select the check box beside each person who attended

• Click Save Attendance

Yes. Send an e-mail to fellowshipone@uubelmont.org with the name of the person(s) that should be leaders of your Group.

Group Leaders can invite or add members to their group, e-mail members, edit the meeting schedule and location, record attendance and view the Roster.

Group Administrators can edit details of the Group, such as the group description and search criteria, and help with prospect lists.

If you have questions about any aspect of your Group, or you would like to be able to change something about your Group, send an email to fellowshipone@uubelmont.org.

Group Prospects are people that you have either invited to join your Group or they have requested to join your Group through the “Find A Group” option. They will be listed under the Prospects tab in the Group that you lead.

• If you have invited the person to join your group, they will become a member as soon as they accept the invitation, and should come off the Prospect list.

• If a person has requested to the join your group, they will become a member if you approve their request and they subsequently accept your approval. Once this happens, their name should come off the Prospect list. If you reject their request, this should also remove them from the prospect list

• You will not receive an e¬mail when someone accepts the invitation or asks to join, so you have to login in to Fellowship One to track what is happening with your prospects. 

Contact us if:

• A prospect you have invited doesn’t accept the invitation to join the group (after a reminder or two) and you would like to have their name removed from the prospect list.

• A prospect that you have invited or asked to be approved accepts the invitation or approval and is on both the Roster and the prospect list at the same time. The admin can remove the person’s name from the prospect list.

Yes. For the groups you lead, Group leaders can take attendance; view the dashboard, roster and prospects; and send e-mails  For all your groups, you can use your mobile device to view the dashboard and roster and send emails. If you are a Group Leader, you can additionally take attendance,  and add/invite new members.

You can use your mobile device to send e-mails in a few ways:

• click the gear icon, then Send an E-mail

• open the Dashboard (you may have to click on the triangle on the right to show the pull down menu), click on Actions, then Send an E-mail

• open the Roster from the pull down menu, click on Actions, then Send an E-mail

Feel free to explore and see what else you can do from your mobile device.

Check our Frequently Asked Questions about Fellowship One.