The story of your weekly service(s) involves more than just attendance. Customize our meeting reports to capture not only attendance; but sermon topic, salvations, baptisms, guests, parking spots, weather, holidays, and anything else that adds depth to your worship history.
Last year I wrote blog posts on How to solve the problem and see the potential of worship service attendance and The best way to collect attendance from all your worship services. These focused on how to use Check-in (we call it All Check) and Connection cards to capture individual attendance. This can be augmented with counters reviewing the total and adding in a # for guests to accurately reflect actual attendance.
Attendance is an important part of the story. It helps you plan for space and care for those who are missing in action. But, many pastors also have an informal calendar, notebook, or document to help them remember specifics about any given Sunday.
Number of parking spaces, for instance, helps leadership determine if they need to start a second service, or pave and stripe an adjacent field. Though most track individual first visit, salvation, baptism, and joined church dates; aggregating those onto a single "score card" gives pastors a bigger picture of what happened on any given Sunday.
Seasoned church leaders know that still other factors need to be accounted for to better understand service attendance and responses. If the weather is too cold, hot, wet, or icy; people will stay home. People go to the lake, beach, mountains, or vacation on holiday weekends more often than normal weekends.
Wouldn't it be great if you could keep all of this information in one quick at-a-glance location?
How about something like this?
Service dates are in the left column. Attendance and other types of information are listed in the header. Here's how to set up and use this system.
- Create the Worship Group. Or use the one you have.
- Customize the header elements. Go to Group & Events > Settings > Meeting Reports.
- Develop a system to input the information. Enable meeting report reminders to go to counters to input attendance, and pastor or admin to update the other information.
- Review and edit the "at-a-Glance" view. From the Worship Group > Reports button (blue) > Meetings.
Let us know if you would like a team member to work on this with you. Or, start a free trial to learn more. We love helping pastors and churches develop the systems they always wanted. This is a great example.
