How to best set up your Google Groups

In this article, you will learn the best way to set up your Google Groups for ease of use in Happeo (and general usage).

What Google Groups can be used for

Typically, there are two main reasons for setting up Google Groups:

1. The first one is communication. It provides an easy method to reach large groups of users without having to select or add them all manually
2. The second method is to use the groups for sharing. The groups can be used for giving access to documents and other Google resources. This is specifically handy when giving out access to Shared Drives (formerly called Team Drives) in Google
   1. For example, if a document or a shared drive is shared on a group level, all members in that group will have access to the content along with future members.
   2. For Happeo, we also use these same groups to set up access within the Happeo platform. This makes it easy to give access to a Channel or Page to the right group of users

You can read more about the difference between Groups and Organizational Units here.

Most organizations already have some user groups set up. The most common group we see in organizations is the group all. This group contains all (active) employees with an account in the organization. This means that with one single Group you will be able to reach everyone.

But what is a good structure to follow when trying to move down from there?

Setting up a good Google Group structure

Here are the guidelines that we recommend when setting up your Google Groups:

• Besides the top-level group that contains all (active) employees, we recommend moving towards a structure that contains all (geographic) locations. This could be narrowed down to multiple levels. Continent > Country > Region > City > Location
• On the other hand, you might also want to add groups that are focused on functional elements. The easiest differentiator here is Department
• As a final step, we recommend setting up the geographic departmental groups (Geography + Department). This leads to a structure that makes it easy to reach very specific audiences
  • To ensure that this can be managed properly, we recommend making use of the “nested groups” principle.

At the top, we can see the distinction between geographic locations, and on the left, we see the departments.

At each beginning of the table, you can see that there is an overlapping Group that combines them all. Setting it up this way means that every user in your organization will be part of at least one group, but likely is part of multiple groups.

The top level in the hierarchy is the all group. Below this group, there are location groups, for example, UK All. Below that, there are specific department groups for each market, for example, UK Marketing.

All employees should be a member of one of the local department groups. The department group is then a member of the group above (nested group). 

If an employee has multiple roles (like marketing and sales), or responsibilities in more than one market, they can, in those cases, be a part of multiple department groups.

The department groups are also organized into department all groups. This means that if you, for example, want to reach everyone in IT in all markets you can use the group IT All, which will reach all IT departments in the organization.