Church / Small Group Accountability with Accountable2You Software

Video Transcript

You’re thinking about offering an internet accountability solution to your church staff or small group members. That’s a great idea. I’m Steve Dwire, founder of Edify Hub, and this video, I’ll show you how to set up a group account for the software I use to keep myself accountable with my internet activity.

First, visit edifyhub.com/accountability, click on Accountable2You, then click Get Started.

If you’re looking for a personal or family accountability solution or one for a small business, go back to edifyhub.com/accountability to find the videos on setting up those accounts. But for a church or small group, following this video makes things simpler and cheaper than having everyone set up their own individual account.

Choose Churches & Groups to see your options for the Group plan. You can choose one of two types of groups. If you want yourself or a moderator you select to automatically get activity reports for members of your group or its subgroups, choose the first option. Members of your group will be able to create their own individual member accounts. With the other option, you won’t be able to set up yourself or a moderator to get the activity reports or alerts automatically. Members will be able to set up their own individual or family plans at a discount when they sign up using one of your invitations. Oh, and they can always choose to include you as an accountability partner if they want you to get their activity reports and alerts.

After you’ve selected which type of Group Plan you want, click “Try It Now.”

Enter your personal information, time zone, and country. Enter the username and password that you’ll use to log on to manage your church’s or small group’s Accountable2You account in the future.

In the Promo Code section, enter edifyhub, all one word. When you do, Edify Hub will earn a commission to help cover the costs of producing this video series, and you will get your first 30 days absolutely free to try things out and make sure that Accountable2You is the right solution for your church or small group. When you’re all done here, click Continue.

Accountable2You will be watching your internet activity and storing it so your accountability partners can see it. It may be worth taking the time to read through their legal agreements to see what they collect and what they do with that data.

We won’t take the time to do that right now, though. Of course, I’m sure you’ll read it carefully.

When you’re satisfied, check the “I agree” box and click Continue again.

Make sure you have the right kind of group selected. Then, when you’re done entering your payment information, click Create Account.

Here’s where you can customize the emails and website experience for the members of your group.

Give your group a friendly name if you don’t want it to be the same as your login.

Here you’ll choose how members join your group and who pays for them. At the time of this recording, the options here are a bit confusing.

You’ll always pay the base fee each month for the main group account. If you want people to be able to self-enroll *and* you want self-enrolling members to pay for their own account, check this checkbox. Understand that this option does not affect members that you add to the group; you’ll decide who pays for those when you send the invitation. So, if you check the “Group members pay for their account themselves” checkbox, then you have to allow users to sign up on their own. That’s why this option is checked and greyed out for me. I have to allow them to sign up.

If you’ll be paying for everyone’s account, then you won’t check this first checkbox, and then you can choose whether to let people sign up for their own accounts without an explicit invitation email from you. If you do allow members to sign up without an invitation and you’re paying for all of the accounts, then you’ll get an email every time someone tries to join the group, and you’ll need to approve the account before it’s activated.

With your group, you’ll get your own “something”.accountable2you.com web address for your members to use. Decide what you want that “something” to be.

If you want, you can upload a custom logo for your group, personalize the welcome message when your group members log on, and let Accountable2You know what kind of group you’re setting up. When you’re done, Save your changes and Go To your Account. Then go to your subdomain.

Before we go much farther, there’s one more minor point to take care of. Your email address has not been verified. We’ll do that now, but don’t click that Verify button quite yet. First check your email.

Over here. This is the Verify button you want to click.

So click that, then Proceed to your Dashboard.

And now you have an account with Accountable2You for yourself. If that’s all you wanted, you would have just signed up with an individual account. The whole point of the group plan is the ability to create separate accounts for your group members so they can each have different devices and different accountability partners.

This dashboard is where you can start inviting the members of your church or small group to join your Accountable2You group account. Click the Send Invitations button to get started managing users.

For each member, click Invite User.

Enter the member’s name and the email address where you want the invitations sent. If you’d like, you can also add a photo to make user management easier. Decide who is paying for this user’s account and whether you want them to be a group administrator. If you want, you can also label the user account with one or more tags to help make your own user management easier. You can always change these later after you figure out what labels are helpful for you. We’ll leave it blank for now and click Save.

Billing for new members won’t start until after they accept the invitation, which you can see here is still awaiting activation.

To invite more members, click Invite User to repeat the process until you’ve invited everyone.