Docusign Trainer Tips: Sending with Signing Groups

Hi, I'm a DocuSign University Trainer. Today, I'll be showing you how to create and utilize signing groups when setting up an eSignature envelope or template. Signing groups allow you to send an envelope to all members of the group, but only one member needs to take action and sign. Signing groups are ideal in scenarios where you need a department or a team signature. Signing groups may not be included with all DocuSign eSignature plans. You can always contact DocuSign support for questions regarding your plan. There will be a link to the support site in the description of this video. Signing groups are created within your admin settings and then signing groups. For this video, I'm going to create a signing group for my legal team. Maybe there are some scenarios where I will need a legal signature for my agreements. I don't necessarily care who from my legal team signs, I just need someone to sign. Whoever from our legal team has bandwidth to review the document and sign will work. This is a perfect scenario for a signing group. I'll click add signing group and I'll give the group a name. I'm going to call it legal team. And we can add our group members. I'll select save changes. Here's my legal team group. Right now, there are no users added. To add people to the group, I can select actions, assign users. You can add up to 200 people to a signing group, as it says here. You can add people who are a part of your DocuSign account as a user. Or you can click add user manually to add someone to the group who is not a part of your DocuSign account by adding in their name and email address. For today's scenario, I'll just add a couple of users from my accounts. I'll do Amanda, Becca, and Carlos. Assign. So now under users in this group, Amanda, Becca, and Carlos are all members of the signing group. By default, each member of the signing group is going to receive their own individual notification when the group is sent an envelope. Each group member will also receive a completion email when the envelope is completed by all necessary signers. If needed under the detail tab, we have the ability to use an alternate email address for notifications sent to the signing group. With this method, instead of each person getting their own email notification, one single email notification will be sent to the email address noted. For example, maybe I have a distro for my legal team, legal@company. com. Now two things to note with this option. Your signing group members will need access to this alternate email address that you add so that they can view the notifications. And your signing group members do need to have a DocuSign account in order to access the envelope from the notification that's sent to this alternate email address. This way DocuSign knows who is actually signing the agreement. For today, I'll remove this and have everyone receive their own notification and save. Once the signing group is added, any sender on the account can include the signing group as a recipient on their envelope or templates. Let's see how we can utilize the signing group for our legal team. I'm creating a new envelope here and I'm going to be sending a non-disclosure agreement as my document. For the recipients, let's say that first it needs to be signed by our customer, Caroline. After the customer signs, I would like someone from our legal team to countersign the NDA. This is where we'll add our signing group. To add the signing group, I can start to type the name of it and it will appear, legal team. Or if I click on the address book icon, I can select from my list of contacts. This includes anyone that I've ever sent an envelope to in the past. And now any signing groups that have been created. So if I search for legal team, here is that legal team signing group. I can select it here. Apply. Once the signing group has been added, you can hover over and see who the signing group members are. So there are three, Amanda, Becca, and Carlos.

On the next page, I'll be able to drag and drop my fields. So starting with my customer, Caroline, I'll just drag on a couple of basic fields like signature, date, name, and title. And then for the legal team, I'll switch my recipient to my legal team signing group and add the fields for that signing group. So only one person, remember, from the signing group will actually be filling in these fields. So I'll go ahead and drag those on accordingly. And send. So now let's observe the signing process. Here is the notification for Caroline, my customer. They will go in and sign the NDA as normal. And after the customer signs, now it's going to be the legal team's turn. Each member of my legal team is receiving their own individual notification. Whoever has time or views the email first can sign on behalf of the group. Remember, only one person needs to sign. So, we'll have Amanda go in this scenario. She'll click review document. Coming in here, Amanda can see that the customer has already signed and Amanda can come in and sign on behalf of the legal team. Now, you might be wondering what happens if one of the other people goes in after Amanda has signed. For example, if Carlos tries to click into the email, he's going to see in here that Amanda has already signed on behalf of the team, so there's nothing left for Carlos to do at this point. Now that the envelope has been completed by all signers, everyone is going to get a copy of the completion email. So, a couple copies here. I am getting a copy as the sender. Caroline, the customer, is getting a copy. And then all three members of the legal team signing group are getting a copy because the signing group was included as a recipient. So, Amanda, Becca, and Carlos. Even though Becca and Carlos did not sign the agreement, they're included here on the completion email. The envelope history and certificate of completion will hold a record of who actually signed the agreement. Utilizing signing groups is a great way to share the signing responsibility with a group of people from a team or a department. So, you're now ready to begin using signing groups.