What are Groups?


Groups in Magpi are a way of categorizing and organizing your contacts.  For example, you might have a contact who is at CDC and works in malaria, so you could add them to the CDC group and the malaria group.



What Can I Do with Groups?


Groups are useful in many ways:


  1. Search: you can search for all the contacts in a group (e.g. all your travel-related contacts, or contacts in a particular location, etc)
  2. Messaging: you can send timed or instant messages to all the people in a group (much easier than having to list all the people individually)
  3. Sharing: you can share a form with all the people in a group (again, much easier than entering all the people individually)



Assigning a Contact to a Group


To assign an existing contact to a group, click on Contacts, then click to select the contact you want to assign to the group (you may have to search for the contact using the Search box).  Once you have the contact selected on the screen, click edit to open the contact form.  Enter the name of the group(s) you wish to use into the Groups box, hitting comma or spacebar after each group name (this registers the group name as in the image below), and then click the Save button.


Here is an example of a contact named Stephany Diaz, who is a member of the "staff" group and the "Afghanistan" group.   If we were to share a form with "Afghanistan" group, Stephany would receive notice that a form had been shared with her.



Creating New Groups


New groups are created just by adding them to the Groups box (as in the image above): 

  • if the group exists, that user or users will be added to it
  • if the group does not yet exist, it will be created and then the user or users will be added to it.


Assigning Groups When Importing Contacts from Excel


If you want to bulk-import a list of contacts from Excel, you can include group information in the Excel file and it will be imported into Magpi with the other contact information.  Read more.



Share a form with a Contact Group

  1. Ensure that all contacts you would like to share with are assigned the same group
  2. On the Share with Mobile app or Website view, enter the contact group you would like to share with, and assign a Form Role e.g 'MobileDataCollector' 
  3. The contact group will be listed in the share view and all contacts in the group will receive a form sharing invitation.







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