An art therapy group is built around a room, a facilitator and a small number of people who have agreed to be there. The artwork that comes out of a session can be personal, and some members will not want it seen by anyone beyond the circle. So the job of the website is modest and specific: provide a closed, well-run place to sign up, to meet and to share, and be honest about what it cannot do.
This guide follows one group from sign-up to aftercare, using BuddyNext for the member space and Eventonomy for sessions, both running on the Reign theme. BuddyNext and Eventonomy are each free with an optional paid Pro licence. Pro features are labelled. For a more general look at art communities, with galleries, critique and selling, our earlier art communities post is the place to start. This guide is about facilitated, private groups.
A firm boundary before the setup. This is not clinical, legal or safeguarding advice, and the software does not make a service compliant with any health privacy regime or professional standard. It offers privacy controls and records, and nothing more. Check the rules that apply to you and to your professional body, including how you obtain consent, what you must keep, and what you must report, and have a qualified person review your agreement and your processes.
What the platform can and cannot promise
Start by being clear about who can see what. A group is only as trustworthy as the promises you can keep, so do not promise what the software cannot deliver.
| Who | What they can reach |
|---|---|
| Members of a space | The posts and media in that space, subject to each post’s audience |
| Space owner and moderators | The space’s settings, member roster, join requests and reports for that space |
| Community moderators | Reports from every space. They do not run, or see inside, a Private or Secret space they have not joined |
| WordPress site administrators | They can manage any space, whatever their space role |
| Anyone with the address of a link-only event | The event page and its registration form |
BuddyNext enforces privacy at read time. A post in a Private or Secret space never appears on the Explore feed or on the author’s profile for someone outside the space, whatever audience the single post carries. That is a real safeguard. It does not remove the administrators, and it does not control what a member does with a screenshot.
So tell members, in plain words, who the administrators and facilitators are, what they can see, and what the group cannot guarantee. A short honest paragraph in the group agreement does more for trust than a long list of switches.
Build the room
One Secret space per group
BuddyNext spaces come as Open, Private or Secret. For a facilitated group, Secret is the natural fit: the space does not appear in the directory, in public space lists or in search results for non-members, and nobody can request to join. The facilitator invites people, and an invited member must accept before they count as active. A Private space, which is listed but approves each request, suits a drop-in group you want people to be able to find.
For site-wide privacy, BuddyNext has a Private community setting under BuddyNext > Members > Privacy & Data called “Require login to view the community”. With it on, a logged-out visitor sees only the login and registration screens. The same tab sets whether search engines may index community pages: Everything, Public posts only, or Nothing.
Invite one person at a time
For a small group you want control over each entry. A space can have one shareable invite link, and you choose when it expires, 1, 7 or 30 days or never, and how many people can use it: 1, 10, 100 or unlimited. Set it to one use and a short expiry, send it to one person after your own screening conversation, and it stops working once used. People who use the link join without approval, but they still complete sign-up and email verification, and a banned person can never use it.
If you run the whole site as invite-only, a valid invitation is required to sign up. Invitations are tied to the invited email address and expire after seven days by default, and you can resend one.
A prompts space that only the facilitator can post in
Each space lets the owner decide who can post: all members, moderators and the owner, or the owner alone. This is enforced when a post is saved, so a member who tries is refused. Create a Prompts space where only the facilitator posts. Members can read, react and comment, but cannot start threads. Then make a second Studio space where everyone can post their work and responses. Keeping the two apart means the facilitator’s instructions are never buried under members’ images.
Use the space’s house rules field for the group agreement. In a Private space, a non-member who opens the space lands on the About tab and can read the description, rules and the moderator list before deciding to ask in.
Enrol people through events
Eventonomy is the front door. Each session is an event, and the sign-up form can carry the questions you need.
One programme or many separate sessions
How you create sessions depends on the format, and there is a limit to know about.
A recurring event in Eventonomy repeats on a rule. A member’s RSVP covers the whole series, and the capacity you set applies across it, which is exactly what a closed weekly group needs. You can cancel a single date, for example a holiday week, from Upcoming dates in the editor. Reminders are sent per date.
On the free plan, recurrence is Daily, Weekly or Monthly with an interval, and there is no end rule. Eventonomy expands the series up to a recurrence horizon, which defaults to 12 months and cannot go below one month. A six-week programme therefore either needs Pro, which adds an end-after count or an end date, or needs you to create the sessions as separate events. Duplicating an event copies its capacity, registration settings and question selection, so six one-off copies are quick. Editing a recurring event edits the whole series, and there is no this-date-only edit, so a session that differs from the rest should be its own event. Our guide to recurring events on WordPress explains the rules in depth.
Make the event private
Under the event’s Visibility panel, choose Private (only people with the link). A private event is left out of lists, the calendar and search, and search engines are told not to index it. Anyone who has the link can open it and register, and it can be passed on. If only signed-in people should be able to open it, Eventonomy documents a developer filter for that, so it is a task for a developer and not a setting.
Use RSVP questions as a record that people read the agreement
Turn on Custom questions under Eventonomy > Settings > Registration. You write a shared bank of up to 20 questions with ten answer types, mark any as Required, and tick which ones each event asks. For a group:
- A required yes or no checkbox: “I have read the group agreement and I understand what the group is and is not.”
- A short Paragraph question: “Is there anything the facilitator should know about how to make the session comfortable for you?”
- Optionally, a Choice question about how they want to take part, for example camera on or off.
Be careful with what you collect. The answer is stored with the registration. A tick box is a record that someone acknowledged your agreement. It is not a substitute for the consent process your profession requires, which you run yourself. And do not ask for health information in a free-text field unless you have decided how you will store it and protect it. Eventonomy hooks into WordPress’s Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data tools, so registration records are covered when you handle a request, but that does not decide what you should collect.
Keep numbers small and the door closed
Set a Capacity, which counts only Going responses, and turn on Waitlist when full so that when someone cancels the oldest waitlisted person is promoted automatically. Under Settings > Registration you can also close registration a set number of hours before the start, which stops people drifting into a session midway, and limit additional guests per RSVP or switch guests off entirely. On a group like this, switching guests off is usually right.
Run the session
Online sessions
For an online session, mark the event as virtual. The meeting link is shown only to confirmed registrants. Eventonomy gives each registrant a personal link that checks their registration is still active and then opens the meeting, so the real meeting address is never shown, and a cancelled attendee’s link stops working. The join button appears from one hour before the start. Reminder emails, sent one day and one hour ahead, carry the same personal link for online events.
Eventonomy is explicit about one limit: to stop someone passing the meeting on once inside, use your meeting platform’s waiting room or sign-in. The plugin controls the link, not the room.
In-person sessions
For a room in a building, set a venue. Venues are stored in a catalogue and reused. The venue is part of the event page that anyone with the link can open, so if the exact address should stay with the people who are going, enter only a general area as the venue and send the full address by email to attendees.
An agenda that mirrors the session
The event agenda lets you list sessions with a title, start and end times and an optional plain-text Speaker field. Use it to show the shape of the hour so people know what to expect: arrival, a check-in round, the making, a sharing round that is optional, and a closing. Knowing the structure in advance helps people who are anxious about the unknown.
Turn off the social proof
Two defaults work against privacy and are worth changing:
- Eventonomy shows who is going: a small stack of recent attendee avatars and the going count near the registration area, on by default. Names appear only as hover labels, and guests count toward the number but are never pictured. The setting Show who’s going is documented as something to turn off for privacy-sensitive events. Do so.
- With BuddyNext Pro active, a published event and a Going RSVP post cards to the community feed, so others can see who is attending. That integration has a switch, Post to the activity feed, under BuddyNext > Integration Settings. Turn it off. You can also turn off including events in community search from the same card.
Making and sharing artwork
Choose the audience each time
A BuddyNext post carries an audience: Public, Followers, Connections, Only me, and for posts inside a space, the space’s members. For a group, set the community default narrower than Public under BuddyNext > Engagement > Social > Activity Feed. The default applies to new posts only. Posts made inside a Secret space default to the space’s members.
Only me is useful here. A member can keep a private record of their own work on the same site without sharing it with the group, and decide later whether to share. A member can edit their own post, including changing its audience, within the edit window, and can delete their own post at any time.
Media, albums and who can organise them
Photos and videos are handled by the media engine, WPMediaVerse, which BuddyNext integrates with. A space can switch on a Media tab under Settings > Integrations, which needs WPMediaVerse active and the media integration switched on under BuddyNext > Integration Settings. It collects the photos shared in that space into a gallery and lets the space keep albums. The space owner can switch on Only organisers can create albums to keep the gallery curated, and a moderator or the uploader can use Remove from space, which unlinks the item and returns it to the uploader’s own library as private rather than deleting it. That is a gentle way to take something down without destroying a member’s file.
On a member’s own profile, each upload carries its own audience, from Public to Only me, and members can delete anything they uploaded.
Two moderation queues
Reports on posts, comments, messages and profiles go to BuddyNext > Moderation > Reports. Reports on photos and videos go to a separate queue under MediaVerse > Moderation, because the media plugin owns the media. A facilitator who moderates artwork must check both. The media reasons include nudity, violence or graphic content, copyright infringement, spam and harassment.
What content warnings can and cannot do
BuddyNext content warnings blur a post behind a label with a Show anyway button. The labels are fixed: NSFW, Spoilers, Violence and Strong language. A warning is applied by a moderator to a reported post, and a member cannot apply one to their own post. So for work that depicts difficult material, put an agreement in your rules that members add a note at the top of their own post, and use the blur only as a backstop.
Messages between members
Direct messages run on WPMediaVerse. The site-wide setting is a ceiling, offering Everyone, Followers only, People the member follows back, or Nobody, and members can choose that level or a stricter one. There is also a minimum account age in days before an account can send a message. Think about whether a closed group wants members messaging one another privately at all, and whether to set the ceiling to Nobody and route contact through the facilitator.
After the session
Aftercare and follow-up
Use the free Email attendees panel on the event’s attendee screen to message everyone who was Going, for example with a thank-you, a note on what the next session covers and the facilitator’s contact details. Only the event’s organiser and site administrators can send it, it goes out in background batches, and people who opted out of event emails are skipped.
Leaving, deleting and keeping
Members can export their data or delete their own account from their settings, when you have left those options on under BuddyNext > Members > Privacy & Data. Do not turn them off without a replacement process. Members can also block, mute or restrict another member, and the Blocked, restricted and muted list under Settings > Privacy lets them reverse it.
Be realistic about retention. The data retention setting in BuddyNext applies to closed moderation reports and, with Pro, analytics events. It does not delete member profiles or posts. If your group agreement promises that artwork is deleted after a set time, that is a manual process you must run, and the software will not do it for you.
A facilitator can also remove a member from a space or ban them from it. A ban blocks rejoining that space, stops participation in it, and affects only that space. Removal without a ban lets the person come back.
Safety and escalation
This is general practice and not a clinical protocol, and nothing in the plugins detects risk or contacts anyone.
- Write down, before the first session, who the facilitator escalates to and what the group does if someone is in distress. Follow the rules of your professional body.
- State in the agreement that the group is not an emergency service, with the emergency number and a recognised local support line for your country.
- Do not rely on the report button for anything urgent. Reports land in a queue, and BuddyNext’s queue alert is a daily email to admins when the backlog passes a threshold. Give members an urgent route outside the platform.
- Keep a short private Secret space for facilitators to hand over notes, and remember it is a record that administrators can reach.
- Review the plan with a qualified professional, and revisit it when the group changes.
Free and Pro at a glance
| Need | Tool | Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Secret and Private spaces, invite links, who-can-post, house rules | BuddyNext | Free |
| Post audiences, Only me, default audience, blocking and reporting | BuddyNext | Free |
| Events, RSVP questions, waitlist, private events, Email attendees, agenda | Eventonomy | Free |
| End-after count and end date for a programme, richer reminder timing | Eventonomy | Pro |
| Check-in for in-person groups, paid tickets for workshops | Eventonomy | Pro |
| Events in the community feed, space Events tab | BuddyNext with Eventonomy | BuddyNext Pro |
| Paid or membership-gated spaces | BuddyNext | Pro |
The plugins overview lists each tier. If you will run sessions on video, our guide to virtual and hybrid events covers the practicalities, and the community guidelines template gives you wording to adapt for the group agreement.
Frequently asked questions
Can I keep the group completely hidden?
You can come close. Make the space Secret, so it is absent from the directory and search for non-members, switch on “Require login to view the community”, set indexing to Nothing, and make the events private. Anyone with the address of a private event can still open it, and administrators can reach every space, so say so in your agreement.
How do I run a six-week programme on the free plan?
Create the sessions as separate events and use the duplicate action to copy capacity and registration settings. A single recurring event on the free plan has no end rule, so it keeps generating dates up to the recurrence horizon. Eventonomy Pro adds an end-after count and an end date.
Does a required checkbox on the RSVP count as consent?
It records that the person acknowledged your agreement at registration. Whether that is enough for consent, and what else you need, depends on your profession and where you work, so check the rules that apply to you and to your professional body.
Can members delete their artwork afterwards?
Yes. A member can delete their own post at any time and delete media they uploaded, and can export their data or delete their account if you have left those options on. Automatic deletion of everyone’s posts after a set time is not a feature, so a promise like that needs a manual process.
Can people see who else is attending?
By default, yes: Eventonomy shows a small stack of attendee avatars and a count, and with BuddyNext Pro a Going RSVP can post to the feed. Switch off Show who’s going in Eventonomy and Post to the activity feed in BuddyNext Integration Settings for a private group.
Is the platform suitable for health records?
Do not treat it as one. The plugins offer privacy controls, but they do not make a service compliant with any health privacy regime. Keep clinical notes in the systems your profession requires, and use the site for scheduling, discussion and sharing that people choose to do.