Last month I wrote about using All Check to capture individual worship attendance at the same time families are checking into Sunday School classes, and/or Volunteer service. The idea is everyone checking into everything. But, we realize that for many different reasons, individual worship attendance is not really a thing for most churches. So, here's another thought for making it easier for your worship attendance counters. It is based on an upgrade we rolled out a couple of weeks ago.
A minstry that oversees a network of churches was working with our team to come up with a way to get worship attendance from each of their churches each week. They came up with the idea of making each church a group in Churchteams and then use the automated email meeting report reminder system to notify the person or people responsible for attendance tracking at each church.
One click on their phone from an email that arrived just hours earlier and they are in the software to input the total attendance number. No username, no password, just open their email and click to record. If they prefer, they can open the Member App, then click on the check box icon just below their worship service group. Either way enters the attendance data directly into the database.
The exact same process can work for any church to track attendance for any service. Be sure to use a different group for each service so that you can see the trendline uniquely for each service. Don't worry, you can combine them in reports for an aggregate total. If you are multi-campus, just create groups for each service on those campuses. Finally, use different groups to track your live streaming and online service.
Our meeting report forms have always had text fields for Prayer Requests and Meeting Notes. We have had the option to create additional text fields for other purposes. But, the church network organization we were working with also requested the option to add numeric fields that could be tabulated. After some discussion and thinking, we added those options. Find them under Groups & Events > Settings > Meeting Reports:
Here's what these options look like on a Meeting Report form.
Only members of the attendance counting team who receive the report reminders or need access in the app are included in the roster for individual attendance. Additional count is the number of people in the service, followed by the response fields that were added with this release. Finally, I would point out the use of Notes to capture any special circumstances like names of those baptized or other factors like weather. Leveraging the Notes field for these things will link that information to the attendance record for this day forever.
The great thing about capturing all this worship service related data in Churchteams, is that it is now available for reporting. Rather than having another application or spreadsheet, you can just keep it all in one place where you can create, save and even schedule reports for ease of communicating data summaries.
Here is the Meetings page summary accessed from the blue reports button within the group.
Here is the Attendance by Group Summary for the same three weeks across three services including the Online Service. This is worth taking a moment to review for all the information available. This would be the report you Save and Schedule to be emailed to whomever needs it on Monday morning.
Finally, the monthly spreadsheet summary of attendance that is emailed to you will have a summary of the new decision fields at the bottom of the page.
The idea for the Salvations, Baptism, and Other upgrades came from what we call a Network Non-profit. If you know of a non-profit that might need some help from a high value, affordable, fully integrated software system, let them know about Churchteams and look for an upcoming blog written specifically for them.
