One of the first things you should do as you get started with ChamberForge is setting up your group. Once your group is created, you can add/invite members, create meetings, manage members and guests and so forth.
To create a group, after logging in, go to the menus on top right and click on the Create a Group menu. The wizard will walk you through the process and you can add various details about your group including name, description, when and where you meet.
Once the group is created, you will be taken to the group's dashboard page. Dashboard is the first screen your members will see when they come to the Group page on ChamberForge.
All groups have their own public page that they can share with guests or those outside the group. To get to the public page, you can click on the little link icon next to the group name on the left navigation menus.
Your group page will display basic information about your group including name, description, location, and members.
The page will also list upcoming meetings where guests can RSVP to one of the meetings.
Guests can also apply for a membership in the group and also send messages to the organizers.
Visibility
Custom fields allow additional data to be collected from members when they report referrals or 1-to-1s.
For example, you can add a dropdown list caleld "Referral Source" with values such as partner referral, customer referral, standard referral, online referral to allow your members to indicate the type of referral when reporting. This additional information allows members to share more information and you can use them in the reports to gain additional insights.
Sometimes, you may want to create future meetings ahead in time to better organize and allow members to tag guests to a future meeting. This requires you to manually create meetings one by one which can be repetitive and cumbersome work.
The Automated Meeting feature allows you to automatically generate meetings. After providing the meeting details for your group, simple set a value for the Automatically generate future meetings field. This field will be 0 by default, meaning you will be creating meeting entries manually. If you provide a value greater than 0, then the system will start automatically generating future meetings for you.
For example, let's say you set up your meeting with following details:
This tells the system to always have 4 future meetings created. At midnight everynight, the system will automatically gnerate meetings to ensure that there are always 4 meetings created in future. So if today is August 24, 2019, the above configuration will generate following meeting entries for you:
You can set this to 8 meetings or 12 meetings. It's totally up to you. And if your group meets regularly and you enable this feature, then you will never have to manually create meetings again.
If you no longer need to maintain a group, you can delete the group by going to the Delete tab within the Group settings page.
Deleting a group will delete all the data except referrals. Referral data is managed by giver and receiver.