Family Categories Setup

Categories are how you group families and members: Shabbos, Hebrew School, Shalach Manos, Board, Camp. Once a family is in a category you can mail them, label them, route a delivery to them, report on them or give them a gift as a group — so the categories you set up decide how easily you can reach people later.

Where They Live

Categories in the sidebar. Two tabs at the top split them in half:

Families — categories for a whole household. Shabbos, Mailing List, Donors.
Members — categories for individual people. Hebrew School, Camp, Women's Circle.

Pick the right half from the start. A camp list is about children, so it belongs under Members; a mailing goes to a household, so it belongs under Families. Moving a list from one to the other later means re-assigning everybody.

The Categories page: Families and Members tabs above a tree of categories with counts, a toolbar for adding, editing and deleting, and a pane on the right listing the families in the selected category.

Categories on the left, the families in the selected one on the right. The number beside a category is how many it holds.

Building the List

Categories nest. A top-level category can hold subcategories, and those can hold their own — so Chabad Hebrew School can contain Grade 3 and Grade 4.

To	Do this
Add a category	Click + in the toolbar. With a category selected, the new one is created inside it
Rename or edit one	Select it and click the pencil
Delete one	Select it and click the trash icon
Move one up or down	The Priority arrows. The ones you use most belong at the top, where they are quickest to assign from
Expand everything	The expand button at the end of the toolbar

Default dates

Editing a category offers a default start date and default end date. When set, they pre-fill the dates on every new assignment of that category — useful for anything that runs a school year or a season. Whoever assigns it can still change them there and then.

Naming Them Well

The names appear in reports, routes, mailings and the gift batch window, so a couple of habits pay off — and nothing here is permanent, since a category can be renamed whenever you like:

Name the group, not the event. Shalach Manos rather than Purim list 2024 — then the same category serves next year.
Use subcategories for the years if you do need to keep them apart.
Keep it short. The name has to be readable in a tree, a report and a dropdown.

Putting Families In Them

Creating the category is half the job. Assigning Categories to Families covers the four ways to fill one — one family at a time, from the category itself, in bulk from a report, or on the way in from a web form.