A new member joins. You open their account, add them to the intro space, then resources, then events, then you remember the course.
Now do that for every person who joined this month.
If that sounds familiar, you don’t need more discipline. You need Circle access groups. Granting access one space at a time works fine at twelve members. It falls apart at two hundred. Someone gets missed, someone gets too much, and you are the only person who knows how any of it is supposed to work, which makes you the bottleneck.
By the end of this you’ll know what access groups do, how to build one, and how to connect it so new members land in the right spaces without you touching anything.
What Is a Circle Access Group?
An access group is a pass. It holds a set of spaces and space groups, and you connect that pass to the doors people come in through, so anyone who enters gets everything on the pass automatically.
Those doors are your entry points: invitation links, invites and bulk imports, paywalls, and your onboarding settings. Someone buys the paywall, they get the spaces attached to it. No message to you, no clicking from you.
Here is the part I like most. If you change what is in an access group later, that change applies to everyone in the group, the members who joined last year and the ones who join tomorrow. You add a space to the group once and you are done.
That is really what this setting does. It moves the knowledge out of your head and into your community, so the rules keep working on the days you are not looking at Circle at all.
What Don’t Access Groups Do?
Two things. They don’t change a space’s own access setting, and they don’t assign roles.
If a space is set to open and it is showing in the sidebar, any member can still join it on their own, access group or not. The group is handing out a key to a door that was never locked. This is exactly why I am not a fan of setting everything to open. For an access group to actually control who gets in, the space has to be private or secret, so get your space access settings sorted before you build a single group.
Roles are separate too. Admins and moderators get set when you invite someone, or on their account, not inside an access group. If you are expecting a group to hand someone moderator powers, it won’t.
How Do You Create an Access Group in Circle?
In the left sidebar, click Audience, then Access groups, then New access group. Name it, add the spaces, and preview it before you connect it to anything.
Name it after the offer
The name shows up everywhere you connect it later, in every paywall and invitation link dropdown, so make it obvious at a glance.
What that looks like:
- Name it for what someone bought or signed up for: Free Members, Core Membership, VIP
- Add a short description while you are there
- Click Create access group
Future you will be grateful once there are more than two of these and you are picking one from a dropdown at 9:00 PM.
Add spaces, or add the whole space group
Inside the group you’ll see two tabs, Members and Access. On the Access tab there are two columns, No access and Access. Click a space or a space group to move it across.
What that looks like:
- Add a whole space group when that entire section of the sidebar belongs to one offer
- Add individual spaces when only part of a group belongs to that offer
- Remember that anything you add stays in sync with the group from then on
This is the decision people get wrong. If you add a whole space group, any new space you create inside it later is included automatically, even a private or secret one. If you only picked certain spaces from that group, new ones are not included and nobody tells you. Add the space group when you want it to grow with the offer.
Check it with View as
This is my favorite trick in the whole platform and almost nobody uses it. From Actions in the top right, choose View as, and you are looking at your community exactly the way a member of that group sees it.
What that looks like:
- Open View as for the group you just built
- Read the sidebar the way a member would, top to bottom
- Click Exit when you’re done
If the sidebar reads like a list of things this person can’t have, that is worth knowing before they see it, not after. While you are looking at it with fresh eyes, the Community Voice Guide is a good companion for deciding how the whole place should sound to them.
How Do You Set Up Membership Tiers With Access Groups?
Build one access group per tier holding only that tier’s own spaces, then stack them on the paywalls: Basic gets Basic, Plus gets Basic and Plus, Pro gets all three.
Connecting a group is the same everywhere. On a paywall, go to the product tab, find the access area, and select the group. You can pick more than one, and that is where tiers stop being painful.
Say you run Basic, Plus, and Pro. Basic is your free tier, so connect the Basic group to your invitation link or your onboarding. For the Plus paywall, connect Basic and Plus. For the Pro paywall, connect all three. Each tier builds on the one below it, so there is no duplicate setup and nothing to rebuild when someone upgrades.
One more stop, and this is the one that costs people money. Go to Settings, then Onboarding, then scroll to onboarding access. Every new member gets whatever access group lives there, no matter how they joined. That is the perfect home for the group everyone should have, and a terrible home for anything you sell. If you run a paywall, keep your paid groups out of onboarding.
What Happens When You Change Access for One Person?
Open their account from Audience and go to the Access tab. You’ll see the groups they’re in, plus a manually added section for anything you granted outside a group, and the group always wins over the manual grant.
A few rules worth knowing before you go changing things:
- You can’t pull one space out of a group from someone’s account. To remove them from a single space, go to that space’s member settings, click the three dots next to their name, and remove them there.
- Members can’t leave a space they got through an access group. They have to ask you. That is intentional, so access doesn’t quietly change without you knowing.
- If you add someone to a group that includes a space you already gave them manually, the group takes over that space. Remove them from the group later and they lose it.
That last one catches people out months after the fact, usually with a founding member who had special access before you built any of this.
Try This Prompt
Before you build anything in Circle, build the map. This one turns a messy list of offers and spaces into the groups you actually need.
“I run a [type of community] for [who] on Circle. Here is every way someone gets in: [list your free signup, paid tiers, courses, VIP, anything else]. Here are my spaces and space groups: [list them]. Build me an access map: which access groups I should create, which spaces belong in each one, and which entry point each group connects to. Stack my paid tiers so each one includes the tiers below it, and flag anything that should not be in my onboarding default access. Give it back as a table with group name, spaces included, and entry point.”
You still make the calls. It just makes sure you look at every door into your community instead of the two you were thinking about.
The Bottleneck Was Never the Clicking
The reason this setting matters is not the clicks it saves you, although it saves plenty. It is that access stops living in your memory.
Right now, if you are the only one who knows that Plus members get the resource space but not the coaching one, then every new member, every upgrade, and every refund runs through you. That is not a system. That is a person with a good memory and a full calendar.
Set it up once and Circle remembers it every time, including on the days you are not working. Then go check your onboarding access, because that is where most of this quietly goes wrong.
Watch the Video
New videos go up every Thursday on Your Community Strategist.
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More Like This
Watch: Circle Spaces 101. Pick the right space types before you start bundling them into groups.
Watch: Invitation Links in Circle. One link can carry free access, a paywall trial, and a member tag at the same time.
Keep Going
If you want every one of these decisions laid out in order instead of piecing it together one tutorial at a time, The Membership Architect walks you through building on Circle one decision at a time, and it lives inside coCreator Society. The free Circle templates, guides, and tools will get you started in the meantime.
coCreator Society is where community builders and membership founders work through this together, with the templates, the walkthroughs, and people who are one step ahead of you. Join coCreator Society
If you would rather not do this part alone, Rachel and the team build, migrate, and run communities for founders who need it done properly the first time. Talk to the team
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