Sometimes individual attendance is tracked in worship in order to reach out to people who miss multiple times. This works fine for really small churches, but larger churches empower their small groups to shoulder the burden of care.
If you're curious how we would do this in Churchteams, here are a couple of really helpful Knowledge Base articles.
What is a worship attendance group and how do we track worship attendance?
What is the best way to track individual worship attendance using a Connection Card?
As many of you know, we sponsor and have learned much from the Renegade Pastors Network. In addition to worship, one of the major metrics they emphasize is to track the number of first and second time guests.
I was recently with a church in this network working on the best way to measure and track first and second time guests in Churchteams without having to extrapolate that data into a spreadsheet in order to create a report or trend line.
We took the exact same attendance process that we use for worship (auto-register attendance in the worship group when they choose a particular service on the connection card) and applied it to First and Second time guests. The idea is that when they either fill out a digital connection card, or are manually entered from a card through our check-in process (see links above), a person is auto-registered and auto-attended in the first or second time guest group.
As a result we can use the Attendance Line Chart to show first time attenders (blue line), second time attenders (green line), and New Members (Dashed red = 1 class per month) over any time frame we choose.
Maybe I'm slow to the game, but I hadn't thought of using attendance tools to track benchmarks like these. All we're doing is leveraging the power of our groups based software to attend and then report on significant connection journey benchmarks.
Hmm. I wonder if we could use this for other discipleship benchmarks? Stay tuned.