Creating a Group is the easy part. The hard part comes from deciding exactly what purpose the Group will serve.
You can populate a Group with contacts based on any criteria that you want. Here are a few examples of ACT! Groups that will really help you to organize your work load:
- Project Management: Groups work really well if you work on large projects and want to track all contacts and activities that relate to a project. For example, if you're building a home, you're probably dealing with a number of different people ranging from building inspectors and city officials to subcontractors, your own personnel, and the new homeowner.
- Tracking real estate listings: You might create a Group for property that you rent or are selling. Setting up a Group for each property allows you to track all clients that have visited a particular property and conversely to list all properties that you have shown to a particular client.
- Organizing your classes and seminars: Creating a Group for each seminar or class that you teach will allow you to see at a glance all the registrants. Conversely, you will also be able to track which classes an individual contact has taken with you.
- Keeping in touch with your contacts: Because Groups can be populated based on a dynamic query, they are ideal for tracking contacts that would otherwise slip through the cracks of your database. For example, you might want your Group to include customers who you haven't heard from in 90 days, or prospects that you've never contacted.
The beauty of an ACT! Group is that it can be used to track several variables. For example, your Groups might consist of customers whom you have not contacted in 90 days.
Too often ACT! users create Groups based on a single field value or use Groups as a replacement for fields. For example, you might be tempted to create one Group for the Attorneys in your database and another for all the Accountants. Unfortunately those Groups don't stand the test of time and they require too many steps on the part of the user. A better alternative would be to create one field with a drop down that contains both Attorney and Accountant that can be readily accessed from the Contact Detail view.
- Click Groups on the ACT! Navbar. The Group Detail view opens like the one you see in the following figure. It should look vaguely familiar; in fact, it's nearly identical to the Contact Detail window. Just like the Contact Detail window, the Group Detail window features tabs along the middle of the screen. And, just like the Contact Detail window, the Group Detail window allows you to choose the layout of your choice:
- Create a new Group by following any of these methods:
- Enter a name for the new Group in the Group Name field. This is the only required field.
- Add a description in the Description field (optional).