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Running your Event (Event Hub)

Groups: control access, networking & comms

Last updated: September 2026 · ~6 min read
In short: A group is a named set of people, and it is the single most useful thing you will set up. The same groups decide who appears in your networking lists, who can open a gated page or session, who is expected at the door, and who receives a given message. Get them right early and the rest of the event configures itself.
What groups control in Eventira One attendee list feeds a layer of groups. Those groups then decide four separate things: who appears in networking directories, who can open gated pages, who is expected at check-in, and who receives each message. One person can belong to several groups at once. Attendee list everyone at the event Groups All attendees Board Conference dinner several per person Networking lists who’s in the directory Gated pages who can open what Check-in who’s expected at the door Communications who receives each message
Set your groups up once, and four different parts of the event start behaving correctly.

Why groups do so much work

Every person at your event lives in one list under Event Hub → Attendees. A delegate, a keynote speaker, a board member and a volunteer are all rows in the same table. What tells them apart, and what the platform acts on, is the groups they belong to.

Someone can be in as many groups as makes sense. A person might be in All Attendees, Board and Conference Dinner at once: listed publicly, able to open board papers, and expected at dinner on the Friday.

The four jobs a group does

  1. Networking: who appears in the attendee list

    Groups build the people pages attendees browse in the app. Tick Build Page on a group and it gets its own list, so Speakers, Board and All Attendees each become something an attendee can scroll and search. Leave it unticked and the group still works for everything else, it just isn’t published as a directory.

    This is the control you want before anyone worries about privacy. If a group shouldn’t be a published list of names, don’t tick Build Page.

  2. Gated access: who can open what

    Pages can be restricted to chosen groups. That’s how a members-only page, a board pack, an early-career workshop or a sponsor briefing stays out of view for everyone else while the rest of the site stays open. You set it per page, so the same event can be mostly public with a handful of restricted corners.

    The controls live in Event website → Configuration, a row per page with a Who has access column. Leave it on everyone for open pages and switch it to a group for the ones that should be gated. The same table sets each page’s Visibility, whether it opens in app or in a browser, and which page is your home page.

    The Configuration tab of Event website, listing each page with columns for icon, browser, who has access, visibility, platform and home page.

    Groups with Build Page ticked show up here too, listed under User Groups alongside your ordinary pages. A ticket tier like Day Pass or VIP Pass is a group, so it becomes a page you can gate like any other.

  3. Check-in: who is expected, and where

    Groups carry through to the door. Checking in the Conference Dinner group on Friday evening is a different question from checking in All Attendees on Wednesday morning, and groups are what let you ask each one separately. See How attendees check in with QR codes.

  4. Communications: who hears from you

    Messages go to groups, not to your whole list. A room change reaches the people in that stream; a dinner reminder reaches the people who bought a dinner ticket. It is the difference between an event people pay attention to and one they mute.

Setting groups up

Open Attendees → Groups and click + New group. The User Count column shows how many people are in each one, which is the quickest way to catch a group you meant to fill and didn’t.

The Groups tab listing each group with its user count and a Build Page tick.

To fill a group, go to the User tab, tick the people you want and use Add to group. You can select a whole filtered page at once, so “everyone from this import” or “everyone in that category” is a couple of clicks rather than a couple of hours. Groups can also come straight from your spreadsheet at upload time, see Import attendees, speakers & sponsors in bulk.

How groups relate to your event’s accessibility

Groups work differently depending on how open your event is as a whole:

Three ways to set up access Public events are open to anyone, with sign-in only when an attendee does something. Public events with gated pages are open except for specific pages restricted to chosen groups. Private events are invite-only: the attendee's email must already be on your list. More open More restricted Public Anyone can find it and read everything. Sign-in only when they save a session, message or leave feedback. Public, gated pages Open, except for pages you restrict. The attendee list, a members area, a paid workshop. Set by group. Private Invite only. Nobody else can find a way in. You add their email first. It has to match the one they sign up with.
How open your event is decides how much work groups are doing.
  • Public events are open to all and visible from your landing page. Groups mostly shape the networking lists. Attendees still sign in for anything that records an action, saving a session, messaging someone, giving feedback.
  • Public events with gated pages keep most information open but restrict specific pages, an attendee list, a members area, to chosen groups. This is the most common shape for a conference with a membership behind it.
  • Private events are invite-only. Attendee emails go in first, and the event only appears in someone’s My events after they sign up with an address you added. Groups then control what each invited person sees.

See Create your first event for choosing between the three.

Start from your questions, not your data. Write down the questions you’ll need to answer during the event. Who is at dinner? Who can see the board pack? Who needs the room-change message? Then make a group for each one. Groups built that way stay useful; groups built from whatever columns happened to be in the spreadsheet usually don’t.
Check Build Page before you go live. It is the one group setting with a public consequence: it turns a group into a browsable list of names. Read down the Groups tab once before launch and make sure every ticked row is one you’re happy to publish.

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