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What is a Group?

A Group is a persistent, reusable collection of people. Every participant in Eventene — attendees, members, staff, volunteers, speakers, guests — lives in a Group.

A foundational architectural choice in Eventene is that Groups exist independently from Events. Events reference Groups, but a Group is not contained inside any one Event. The same Group can be referenced by many Events over time, and people accumulate history across them.

Groups do two things:

  1. They hold the data — each person has a profile with name, email, custom fields, and tags
  2. They control access — when an Event's Activity references a Group, only people in that Group see and respond to that Activity

Groups persist; Events reference them

This separation is one of Eventene's foundational architectural choices, and it shapes how the rest of the platform works.

Many event tools Eventene
Attendees are uploaded into a specific event People live in persistent Groups, separate from any Event
The attendee list dies when the event ends Groups continue to exist across many Events
Each event rebuilds its own list The same Group can be referenced by many Events
Participant history is event-scoped People accumulate history across Events

For organizations running recurring programs — monthly meetups, quarterly trainings, annual conferences, ongoing memberships — this means you maintain your roster once. Each new Event references the same Groups. This is what makes member management, longitudinal reporting, and repeat-participant workflows possible.

Main Groups and Subgroups

There are two kinds of Groups:

  • A Main Group is the source-of-record for a set of people. It contains the full list, including all profile data.
  • A Subgroup is a filtered view of a Main Group, defined by rules. Subgroups are not separate copies — they always reflect the current state of the Main Group.

Most organizations have one or a few Main Groups and several Subgroups derived from them.

See What is a Subgroup? for the details.

What's inside a Group

Every person in a Group has:

  • Reserved fields: First Name, Last Name, Email (the Email field also serves as the account identifier — see What is a Persona?)
  • Custom fields: any additional data you define — Type, Location, Department, Membership Level, and so on
  • Tags: color-coded labels for quick segmentation (What are Tags?)
  • An Eventene ID — a unique identifier scoped to this Main Group

You can also export the contents of a Group as a CSV, or import people from a spreadsheet.

About the Eventene ID

Each person in a Main Group has an Eventene ID — a unique identifier you can use as a stable reference (for example, as a Membership Number or a join key with an external CRM). The Eventene ID appears in the Backup export and in Orders.

Some specifics worth knowing:

  • The Eventene ID is unique within a Main Group, not across all your Main Groups or across the platform. If the same person is also a member of a second Main Group, they will have a different Eventene ID in that other Group.
  • If a person is deleted and re-created, they receive a new Eventene ID.
  • Eventene IDs do not survive a Transfer Event between accounts.
  • Personas (multiple people sharing one email) each have their own Eventene ID within the Main Group.

If you use the Eventene ID in an external integration, design with this scope in mind.

How People relate to Groups

A person belongs to:

  • One Main Group at a time (their source-of-record)
  • Any number of Subgroups derived from that Main Group

If you delete someone from a Main Group, they are removed everywhere — including any Subgroups that included them.

A note on terminology

In Eventene's earliest versions, the people primitive was called a List. There were Lists of People and Lists of Places. In February 2019, Lists of People were renamed Groups, and Lists of Places were renamed Sections. The new names made it clearer what each contains.

If you encounter older customer scripts or saved exports that reference "Lists," they are most likely referring to today's Groups.

See Also