Using Owner Groups for Forms and Submissions

Do you have a distributed team where people are responsible for different programs? Do you have people (like reviewers) who only need access to a small number of your forms or submissions? If yes, Owner Groups is for you!

 

Check out this 2-min video that walks you through how easy it is to set up an Owner Group and assign submissions to it:

Quick Links:

• What is an Owner Group?
• Why is an Owner Group Helpful?
• Creating an Owner Group
• Managing Group Members
• Inviting New Users To an Owner Group
• Setting a Default Submission View for Your Owner Group
• Notifications To Group Members
• Assigning Submissions to a Group
• Best Practices
  • Team Members Responsible For Different Programs
  • Branch/Store Managers Responsible for Different Regions in the Same Program
  • Multiple Reviewers for the Same Submission
  • Streamline Experience and Limit Access with Limited Administrator Roles
  • Advanced Workflow Example

What is an Owner Group?

An Owner Group is simply a collection of two or more administrators.

Previously, you could only assign ownership of a form or submission to one administrator on your team. Now, with Owner Groups, you can assign the same form or submission to multiple administrators at once.

When an Owner Group is assigned ownership of a form or submission, all members of the Owner Group will get in-platform notifications and emails about any activity related to the form or submission.

Only team members with either a Full Administrator or Limited Administrator permission level can be part of an Owner Group. For Limited Administrators, their role must be set to include access to forms and submissions. Learn how to do this here. 

See Best Practices for different scenarios where Owner Groups are helpful.

 

NOTE: You can create as many groups as you like and a single administrator can be part of multiple Owner Groups. 

Why is An Owner Group Helpful

First and foremost, Owner Groups allow you to work as a team with shared responsibility for forms and submissions. Being part of an owner group ensures all of the people on the team have access and are sent relevant notifications about the forms and submissions they own. Multiple owner groups could be used for different aspects of your review workflow. Perhaps one owner group owns the form, and does triage of all new submissions before assigning them to the reviewer group. The reviewer group gets notified and adds scores and comments to the submission. Once the review is complete the submissions can be assigned to the final decision making team. Whether you are one team taking a submission through review and approval or multiple teams that work together, owner groups will help streamline your communications and record keeping. 

Owner groups also make it much easier to manage administrator permissions for individuals. Over time, people transition through roles where they should no longer be responsible for forms or submissions. It could be because they changed to another department, went on leave or even left the business. If you assign ownership to forms and submissions to an individual, you have to transfer anything they own to someone else before you can change their permissions or remove them from the team. If you have ownership assigned to an owner group, you can remove people from the group without any consequences and other members of the group will maintain access to owned content. 

Creating An Owner Group

To create an Owner Group, head to the "Forms / Story Generator" page in your left-hand navigation, click on the "Owner Groups" tab, and then click the "New Group" button.

You'll be asked to name your group and then will be taken to the Owner Group Details page where you can add and manage group members.

Managing Group Members

It's easy to add or manage group members for an Owner Group you've created. Simply click the "Manage" button next to your group.

You'll be taken to the Owner Group Details page. From here you can easily add and remove team members and see which forms and submissions the group has been assigned ownership of.

Note: Removing a team member from a group does not change their permission level.

Inviting New Users to an Owner Group

Normally, you would invite new administrators or limited administrators from the Team page. If however you are inviting a user to a limited administrator role with Owned Only permissions, when they accept the invitation they will not be able to see any submissions until they are added to a group. To avoid confusion and skip the extra step of manually adding the new user to an Owner Group, you can invite them to be a limited administrator in a Role and Owner Group at the same time. 

To do this, you visit the Owner Group Details page that you want the new person added to and click the 'Invite New Limited Admin to Group' button. A form will come up where you can pick the role you want the new administrator to have and then you can email that invitation, along with an optional message to the user(s). 

NOTE: This feature is only for inviting new people as limited administrators, existing administrators can be added to groups or have their role changed at any time. xx

Setting a Default Submission View for Your Owner Group

If you want a particular Owner Group, like a review committee, to have an access to a specific submission view, you can make it the default view for that Owner Group. Here is how you do it. 

Notifications To Group Members

When you assign ownership of a form or submission to an owner group, ONLY members of that group get notifications about activity with that form or submission. For forms that would be notifications about any new submissions. For submissions, the owner group members would be notified when they are assigned the submission. 

Assigning Submissions to a Group

If you want to assign a single submission to a group, find it in your submission list and click on the triple dot menu, there is an option to assign a new owner. This can also be accomplished in the Submission Details page. 

If you need to change the owner of more than one submission at a time, select as many submissions as you need from your submission list by clicking the box at the left side of each submission. As soon as you select more than one submission, new 'bulk actions' will appear at the top of your submission list. One of the options is to change the owner. These options will also float on the screen as you scroll down your list. 

Best Practices

When should you use Owner Groups? The best uses for Owner Groups are to streamline who owns what on your team and for creating a streamlined application review process. Here are some common scenarios:

Remember: In order for someone to be part of an Owner Group, they need to be either a Full Administrator or a Limited Administrator. Employee level team members are not eligible to be part of an owner group. 

You have team members responsible for different community programs

If your team is organized in a way that certain administrators are responsible for specific community programs, you can use Owner Groups to ensure each team member only gets notifications about the forms and submissions that pertain to them. You would simply create an Owner Group for each community program, add your administrators to the right group, and then transfer ownership of the relevant forms and submissions to these Owner Groups. 

Your branch/store managers need to review/approve submissions in their region

If you have branch/store managers that are responsible to review submissions made in their region, you can set up an Owner Group for each region and add your branch/store managers to the appropriate group. Also, add a question to your form to ask which region the applicant is from. Then, as those submissions come in, one of your administrators can triage and transfer ownership of the submissions to the appropriate regional Owner Group.

You have multiple reviewers who need to review/approve the same submission

If each of your submissions needs to be reviewed by multiple reviewers, you can set up an Owner Group of those reviewers and transfer ownership of those submissions to that Owner Group. All members in that group will receive a notification when the submission is transferred to them. 

Members in that group would also have the ability to add notes to the submission, identify how much $$ they think should be given out, and/or change the state of the submission. Reviewer Fields will help you quantify review scores and keep review comments anonymous if desired. 

Streamlining your Owner Groups' experience and limit access by using Limited Administrator roles

Owner Groups are a great way to organize and manage which administrators receive notifications about which forms and submissions.

You can streamline and simplify things even further for reviewers by using Owner Groups in conjunction with Limited Administrator roles. A "Limited Administrator" can only access and manage the areas of management they are granted permission for, which simplifies their view in management to include only the left-hand navigation pages and tabs they need to see.

Learn more about creating Limited Administrator roles here. 

A Workflow Example

Use Roles, Owner Groups and Advanced Views to make an end to end submission review workflow, sharing responsibility between several different teams. All notifications and communications are handled automatically as each team member does their job.