Managing Google Groups

How do you get to Google Groups?

Google Groups is an app that is part of Swarthmore's Google Workspace. You can access it by clicking on the App Menu (or the icon made up of 9 squares) in the top-right corner of any other Google app such as Gmail or Drive.

Open

Clicking here will open up your apps menu, where you will find the Google Groups icon.

Open

This will take you to the home page for the Groups app. From here you can click on “My Groups”, found in the upper-lefthand corner of the screen. This will take you to a list of all of the groups you are a part of here at Swarthmore.

There may be groups on this list that you were added to as a member automatically, such as the Faculty-Staff list. The names of these groups will likely be followed by the two icons below. These allow you (from left to right) to leave the group, or add it to your favorites.

There may be some groups that you manage – You can tell that this is the case if you see two bonus icons to the left of the others. The first (gear icon) allows you to manage the group’s settings. The second (person icon) allows you to add members to the group.

How do you change your email settings?

1. Click on the group from your My Groups list that you wish to change your email settings for

   1. Ex. Faculty-Staff

2. On the left-hand side at the bottom choose “My membership settings”

3. Under the Subscription section, use the dropdown menu to choose how you would like to receive emails from the group

   1. We suggest “Each email” or “Digest”

How do you add members?

1. At groups.google.com, click on the name of a group that you manage.

2. In the lefthand sidebar, click on “People” to pull up a list of your group’s members.

3. Beneath the search bar at the top of the screen, you should see an option to “Add Members”. Clicking on this will open the following window:

   4. Currently, the above window is set to ‘Send invites to join group’. This means that users will have to accept an invitation to be added. If you toggle this switch to blue, you can directly add users without requiring an accepted invite. This is only recommended when the intended members are already aware they are becoming part of a mailing list or group, and are also members of your organization.

How do you remove and/or manage members?

1. At groups.google.com, click on the name of a group that you manage.

2. In the lefthand sidebar, click on “People” to pull up a list of your group’s members.

3. Hover over the name of a member you wish to remove, and click on the checkbox that appears.

4. In the upper righthand corner of your screen, a set of symbols will appear, representing various management options. The leftmost symbol, a minus sign within a circle, is the ‘remove’ option. The next symbol, a circle with a slash inside it, is the ‘ban’ option. Banning is permanent and Google will ask you to report why you are banning that user, so use extreme caution with this option.

   1. The third icon above, resembling a price tag, is “change role”. This allows you give someone different permissions than they had before - e.g., turn a Member into a Manager or vice versa.

   2. The fourth icon above, resembling an envelope, is “change subscription”. This allows you to change how often the selected member receives email from the group. Members can change this on their own, which can often lead to them missing important group announcements. This allows you to reset their email delivery settings for the group.

   3. The final icon above, resembling a pencil, is “change posting”. You can change whether members are able to “post to” or email the group. You can leave it as the default group setting, or you can override this setting and choose to Allow, Disallow, or Moderate the selected user's messages to the group.