We also need this, especially for our volunteers many of whom are not members.

At the moment we have custom fields but it is unwieldy.

No update yet.

Any update on this issue of allowing the group functionality to be available to both contacts and members. Has there been any review of this issue in a while?

My concern is that "groups" control website access in addition to their natural function of separating contacts into categories. If the current group field could be moved to be allowed for all contacts (member and non-member), then we could use groups to control webpage access as well. Which would be ideal.

It would be great if the "groups" function now only available for Membership types could also be used for contacts. Currently, we have no real way to group and separate our contract list (which we use for marketing and member development opportunities) and it would be great if Groups could be used to classify our contacts into buckets (if you will). Hopefully others can see a need for this and we can see this move into production.

We would also like to be able to add non-member contacts to groups.

There are many times we want to track the engagement of a specific group of non-member contacts, or send an email to a specific group of non-member contacts.

For example, we recently had a workshop program attended by members, existing non-member contacts, and also individuals who had no prior contact with our organization. I needed to send follow-up emails to all those who attended, and I wanted to encourage membership to those who are not members. I had to create the emails and then manually add each individual to the email.

I want to identify non-members who are very engaged (by opening emails, for which we need a filter in search criteria) and target them for volunteering and for membership. And I want an easy way to follow up to track their responses. Creating a group is what makes sense to accomplish this.

This need arises fairly frequently.

We would also like to be able to add contacts (non-members) to groups. This would be helpful for contacts we email regularly as groups, e.g. volunteers, prospects, etc. We could use custom fields, but that makes membership/participation in multiple groups tricky. Using the group participation functionality would be awesome.

Thanks for comments - we keep in mind this request. Still cannot promise when it's going to be done.

Currently one can only be a member of a group if one is a member of our organisation. It would be fantastic if we could us the group system for non members so we could communicate directly with identified groups in the hopes they will become members or attend events where we can convert them to members. Also, we have corporate partners who are not eligible to become members constitutionally but who I would love to email as a group and manage as a group to keep them informed adn engaged.

You got it! Thanks for the suggested work around, I'll try that next time.

What you can currently do is to create a custom admin-only field like "Promotion" - then mark all appropriate contacts via that field and using advanced search/saved search.

I suspect the underlying point is that the interface for including (member) records into a group is better/faster to mark a set of records than the approach above, am I correct?