Getting started — team managers

For teachers, camp coordinators, transport administrators, excursion organizers, and anyone else managing how people are grouped. Everything from creating your first team to exporting results.

1. Creating a team

Log in to Clever Groups and go to Teams. Click Create Team and give your team a name — for example, Year 9 Science 2026 or Camp Cabin Groups. The name is only visible to you.

Each team gets a unique join code — a short code your students use to join the team and submit preferences. You can find it on the team page at any time.

Tip: Create a separate team for each class or activity. This keeps your history clean and makes it easy to compare runs across different occasions.

2. Team status

Each team has a status that controls whether team members can join and submit preferences. You can change it at any time from the team page.

Open — team members can join via the join link, create a guest account, or register with an email, and submit or update their preferences. Use this while collecting preferences.
Closed for guests — only team members who registered with an email address can still submit preferences. Guest accounts (join link and manual guest) are locked out. Useful if you want to accept late changes from registered members only.
Closed — no one can join or submit preferences. Set this when you’re ready to generate and don’t want any further changes to the preference data.

Tip: Close the team before generating groups to prevent last-minute preference changes affecting your result.

3. Collecting names & preferences

Share the join link (recommended)

The easiest way to get names and preferences into Clever Groups is to share the join link with your team. You’ll find it on the team page — it looks like:

clevergroups.com/join-team?join_code=XXXX

Students open the link, enter their name, and a guest account is created automatically — no email address or registration required. They’re taken straight to the preferences page to submit their choices.

You can also display the join link as a QR code — click the QR code icon on the team page to generate one suitable for projecting or printing.

What students see: They enter their name, pick the other team members they’d like to be grouped with (in preference order), and submit. That’s it. See the student guide for more detail.

How many preferences should students submit?

Students can nominate as many preferences as they like, ranked in order. Clever Groups uses the full ranked list — the more preferences submitted, the more flexibility the algorithm has to find a good arrangement for everyone.

A practical guideline: ask students to submit 2–4 preferences. One preference can be limiting if group sizes are constrained; more than four adds diminishing returns for most team sizes.

4. Importing via Excel

If you already have a list of names — or want to enter names, preferences, categories, and keep-apart pairs in bulk — use the Excel import.

Download the import template from the team page, fill it in, and upload it. The template columns are:

Column A — Row number (filled in by Clever Groups; do not modify)
Column B — Student name
Column C onwards — Preference 1, Preference 2, … (names exactly as they appear in Column B)

Categories and keep-apart pairs can also be included in the import file — see the template for the exact column layout by clicking Download Excel Example in the Teams menu.

Important: If you plan to import students with category assignments, create your categories in Clever Groups first (see Categories) before running the import. The import expects category names to already exist in the team.

Tip: The import merges with any existing team data. You can import additional students without overwriting those already in the team.

5. Choosing a mode and generating groups

Once your team has names and preferences, click Generate Groups. A dialog opens where you configure the group structure manually before generating.

Number of groups — how many groups to create.
Group sizes — how many people should be in each group.

Add Group Entry adds another row, letting you define as many different group sizes as you need in the same generation — for example, 3 groups of 6, 2 groups of 5, and 1 group of 4.

Add Category Entry appears within each group entry and lets you control how students from a category are distributed. Categories are defined by you — common examples include “Girl”, “Boy”, “House Group”, “Learning Support”, or “Class Leader”. For each group size, you can specify how many students from each category must be included — for example, 3 girls and 3 boys per group of 6.

Once the group structure is set, choose a generation mode:

Preference Groups

Finds the arrangement that maximizes the average group satisfaction across the whole team — the best overall outcome. Someone may not get their top choice if placing them differently creates a better result for everyone else. Best for classroom activities where the overall balance matters most.

Demand Groups

Treats each preference as a demand. Prioritizes making sure that every person ends up with at least one person they chose — not just the best average outcome, but a real personal win for everyone. If someone can’t be placed with anyone they chose given your group sizes and keep-apart rules, Clever Groups tells you exactly who and shows how close it got.

Two sub-options control which preferences count:

All preferences — Looks across each person’s full ranked list. Best when students submitted 2 or more preferences.
First preference only — Focuses exclusively on each person’s top choice. Best when only one preference was collected.

Note: Demand Groups counts as 1 credit per generation on free trial and Foundation Free plans — the same as any other generation. All paid plans include unlimited generations across all modes.

Random Groups

Assigns people to groups without reference to any preferences submitted. Each run produces a completely different arrangement. The satisfaction score and preference counts are still measured and shown afterwards — so you can see how a random draw compares to a preference-based generation on the same team.

Keep-apart pairs are respected in all three modes. Any pair you’ve flagged as “keep apart” will never be placed in the same group, regardless of mode. See the constraints guide.

6. Reviewing and tweaking

After generation, Clever Groups shows you the groups and a stats panel with satisfaction scores. If you want to adjust the arrangement:

Drag and drop — drag any student card to a different group. The stats update live as you move people.
Regenerate — run generation again to get a fresh result. Each run may produce a different arrangement depending on the mode.
Glyphs — small icons next to each student’s name show whether their preferences were met. See the results guide for what each glyph means.

Tip: Drag-and-drop changes are reflected in the satisfaction scores, so you can see how a manual swap affects the overall result before saving.

7. Displaying groups

Click Display (or the projector icon) to switch into display mode — a clean, full-screen view of the groups suitable for projecting to the class. The satisfaction glyphs are still visible but the interface controls are hidden.

Press Escape or click the close button to return to the edit view.

8. Exporting and printing

From the results page you can:

Print — opens the browser print dialog with a clean layout. Group names and members print without the navigation and controls.
Export to Excel — downloads a spreadsheet with each student and their assigned group. Useful for record-keeping or feeding into other systems.
Copy to clipboard — copies the group list as plain text, ready to paste into an email or document.

9. Saving to history and comparing runs

Every generation is saved to your team’s history automatically. You can view past runs from the team page and compare the satisfaction scores across different runs — useful if you’re experimenting with group sizes or modes to find what works best for your team.

History is stored per team, so switching between teams keeps your records separate.

Important: History records the group arrangements at the time of generation, but it is not a fixed snapshot of team membership. If students are added, removed, or renamed after a run, those changes affect how past history entries display. For a definitive record of a specific generation, export it to Excel or print it at the time.

Also see: Understanding your results • Group sizes, categories & keep-apart rules • Student guide