Event Attendance Tracking

Hi,  it'd be great if you could provide a way to track event attendance.  So that I could record what people have attended what events.  Then obviously to generate some reports to show attendance for an event, report on people who haven't attended an event for a certain amount of time etc. 2008-03-11T07:28:10-07:00

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Sam Carmack

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Event Attendance Tracking

2008-04-12T10:10:29-07:00

If you ever do this, and it would be no small task. I would like a report which showed significant changes in attendance patterns. If you are going to prevent someone from leaving your church, you have to catch them early in the process.  I also would like to have an analysis of changes in giving patterns.  For now, it would be nice to have a simple interface for total attendance and offering which a logged on member could see. Eventually, there needs to be some way to track key statistics, such as attendance and offering, but also, baptism, membership class, profession of faith, etc. 2008-03-11T07:37:35-07:00

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2008-03-11T07:44:15-07:00

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Hi Samuel, Yes I agree.  For starters simply recording key statistics like total attendance and tithes against an event would be great.  The only thing I'd to add to this would be to get a report on the average attendance/tithes over a time period. 2008-03-11T07:54:45-07:00

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good point, i agree 2008-03-11T08:19:43-07:00

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There are soooo many things that would be awesome here. I agree, this is an add on for later, and that core functionality must come first, but I like dreaming! 8-)  What about a chart that shows the person's attendance TREND. They attended this group 75% of the time, the next 50%, another 90%. I would also love to trend their pattern of attendance at each event: do they start attending and then quit, is it habitual. Visual line charts, bar charts etc. For now I will most likely have the small group leaders track this in the notes section for each person, but it would be cool to have it integrated in attendance and have visuals. A report or smart group that would take those who were absent list them so that an email/letter/call can be made/sent. For instance, you enter everyone who attended church last week. Then you can click on "Tell Me Who is Missing" button and send them all a PDF copy of the bulletin and a note letting them know they were missed. It should also be able to print labels, envelopes, etc. Flags. Each group should have a "FLAG" setting. For instance: if you attend a weekly study and you miss one event you are still green. If you miss 2, a yellow flag appears near your name in the group listing warning leaders that they might want to make sure everything is OK. 3 or more is a red flag... check it out ASAP! A red flag should require that the group leader write a note or something to make sure the situation has been resolved in order to be cleared. Ideally, these flags have a default number of absent days per flag that can be modified for specific groups. An accountability group might red flag at 1 miss, etc.  What I have yet to figure out is how a church of 300 or more can track Sunday attendance. Maybe retinal scanners would work ;-) 2008-03-11T08:34:26-07:00

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Hey guys, fun stuff here :) I've already started work on basic overall attendance and donation tracking for events. You'll be able to view an event after it's happened and add in the attendance and donations for it. If it's a repeating event (such as Sunday service) you'll be able to add multiple, just like notes. Then, there will be simple line or bar charts available to track each over time, probably using Google charts api. All the stuff you guys brought up would definitely be cool down the line, but like Deckart said, this basic tracking will be a good place to start. 2008-03-11T09:21:07-07:00

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Michael, good ideas. Why take the time to track individual attendance if it doesn't tell you something important.  I would like a field for a total head count for an event incase  we didn't want to take the time to track individual attendance. 2008-03-11T11:24:24-07:00

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Sam, that's what the initial version of this will be - a field for total head count that can be associated with an event. And, like I said, if it's a repeating event you can add multiple head counts with dates so they can be tracked over time with a little chart. 2008-03-11T12:50:44-07:00

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I feel a philosophical moment coming on, Sam. 8-)  Most of the programs that I have used are basically information repositories. Very few programs are designed as actual "tools". We can list track attendance but we have to work hard to do anything with that information. We can mark people as visitors but there is no good system to DO anything with them. So I have pinned all of my hopes, dreams and expectations on Toby to boldly go where no other programmer has gone before... 2008-03-11T13:22:47-07:00

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I agree 2008-03-11T13:39:32-07:00

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Hi Toby, Mate if you can get event head count/donations going that would be killer!  Of all the web-based Church CMS tools I've checked out StaffTool is by far the easiest to use.  And adding head count/donations for an event would push it over the edge. 2008-03-11T16:24:41-07:00

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Hey guys...I'm wondering about permissions for these things... could it be on the same level as being able to view notes? Do donations need their own permission level? What do you think? 2008-03-12T21:49:31-07:00

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Hi Toby, I'd say donations at least should have its own permissions separate to notes.  It's of a more sensitive nature than a note.  Attendance I'm not too sure on.  I guess if you do it for donations, having the same permission set for attendance would be good. 2008-03-12T23:15:19-07:00

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Donations MUST have a different log in. If you are eventually going to track giving as a whole security and privacy is a must. However, there could be the option for group leaders to track donations/fees collected for their group. 2008-03-13T08:01:24-07:00

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I don't see the need for another login, correctly setup permissions should handle it. 2008-03-13T15:49:59-07:00

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My bad... I meant to type "permission"... I was in a hurry. Sorry for the confusion! 2008-03-13T18:33:26-07:00

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Yeah, I'm thinking that Donations will be its own dropdown for permissions, with options like: <ul> <li>Can not view donation information</li> <li>Can manage donations for groups they lead</li> <li>Can manage all donations</li> </ul> Something like that. And attendance, I think should probably just be at the same level as notes maybe? Or does it really require special permissions as well? 2008-03-13T20:38:29-07:00

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Does attendance need permissions? That is a good question. I do not think it should be lumped with notes because i plan on using the notes for counseling comments, etc. SO... I do not want that information public for anyone but the admins and group leaders. You might have a person who is keeping attendance for Sunday service and that is their "ministry job" (we have such a person in the church). So I would love to just let them do attendance only. It could be the same for small groups, you might delegate the attendance tracking to a person in the group rather than the leader.  As for the donations, should there be an option for read only? Can view but that is it?  2008-03-13T21:06:53-07:00

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Hey guys. So, I made a first rough cut at attendance tally tracking. Please keep in mind, it's a first pass, still rough, and will probably change over time...but, it's a good start I think. Basically, you edit an event you want to track attendance on. There's a new check box near the bottom for attendance tracking. Check it and update the event and there will be a new tab on that events info card for "attendance". When you first click on it, it'll be pretty much empty. You'll notice a little form at the bottom though where you can start entering in past attendance counts. Just choose the date (I'm using drop downs for the dates here because the natural language date parser was treating recently passed events as being in 2007...I'm going to look into that) and enter the tally and hit enter or click add. It'll add a row and update the chart. Once you add a few more, the chart will start to make more sense as it shows a general trend over time. The chart and table of tallies will only show the most recent 10 tally dates (except for while you're adding them for now, it'll always just add the most recently entered to the bottom of the list until I can work on it some more) to give you a general idea for recent trends. So, I know this will need a lot more work: <ul> <li>need to be able to delete entries (instead of editing i'm thinking delete and reenter - it's basically the same)</li> <li>show more than 10 entries</li> <li>useful reporting</li> <li>permissions</li> <li>exploring lots of the ideas you guys had in this thread</li> </ul> Right now the attendance is available to people who can edit the event. I'll get more fine grained with the permissions in the near future. I just really wanted to get this out there for you guys to start playing with since I already had a lot of the backend done and I've been wanting to do this for a while now. Let me know what you think!   2008-03-14T01:59:31-07:00

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Oh, a couple more things... <ul> <li>I'm toying with the idea of changing the not entry interface to be something similar to the tally entry - where it's inline instead of a separate form...obviously the not entry field would be a few lines tall, but i *think* most notes are really short, mostly one liners...let me know what you think on that. </li> <li>The initial pass at donation tracking will be similar - enter a date stamped dollar amount, and perhaps add some tags. I want to take it further over time of course, but I'm thinking that will be a good, simple start for it.</li> </ul> 2008-03-14T02:06:39-07:00

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Good start, on attendance. I like the chart. It gives an immediate reason for a group leader to update their attendance. 2008-03-14T07:43:42-07:00

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Question : Will this integrate into the groups? There might be many, or several events for a group. 2008-03-15T10:29:35-07:00

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Hey Mike...I'm not sure I follow. What's an example of how groups would come into play? 2008-03-15T15:12:07-07:00

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Well, say you have a small group. Wouldn't you want to be able to track attendance for that entire group? If it meets in different homes each week (which some of our do) then each calendar event has to be a unique entry... so how would you be able to track attendance for the duration of the group that way? Or, right now I have a 12 week small group and they have one week that is a holiday and they will NOT be meeting. I have to make that 2 different recurring events, so I can only track each event, but can I see what the entire attendance trend was for the group? 2008-03-15T16:06:34-07:00

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great start, toby.  i mistyped an attendance number.  i can't delete right now, huh?  also, it would be good to either have mouse overs for the different peaks of the line chart, so that you know what each line peak represents.   2008-03-15T18:29:55-07:00

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Mike, ok i see what you mean. So, the way I was thinking of approaching that sort of situation would be creating one general public event for "Home Group" on the night they all meet, but then creating individual events for each group that are private to the members. That way each one could have an active event on their calendars, they could track their attendance, and cancel meetings when the others still meet (once the recurring date exceptions are in). Because not every group is something that meets regularly, right? What do you think. Hey Kye, that's right, no editing or deleting of attendance entries just yet, but I'm sure I'll get that in this weekend. As for fancier charts, yeah I'm looking into it. The charts that are there now are using the Google charts api, so it's very simple and just generated png graphics. It's a pretty cool service. I do have some flash based charts that I've been checking out as well, which would enable a lot more functionality. I kind of think, though, that I might keep the basic charts that are there now as high level "sparkline" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparklines) style overviews, and have Flash based charts in a more detailed reports view or something...still trying some stuff out. 2008-03-15T20:44:45-07:00

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Note on flash charts... they will not display on the iPhone (yet). So if you want to allow admins to see this "on the go" the reports should not be flash. 2008-03-16T11:07:09-07:00

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Toby, I am still processing this in my brain, so I may be quiet for a bit. I am trying to think through the way we USE attendance to figure out the best way to track and display it. This thread has identified two types of attendance: total count per event and individual attendance at events. They both track important data though the location the data is displayed may be different. I am working through the different types of information that could be gleaned from attendance and filtering it down to see if there is a simple, elegant way to get a bunch of information with very little entry. Again, I have not seen this done well with any program so I am not quick to give my suggestions. I am surprised, actually, to see something in stafftool for this already - though I understand the need for testing, feedback, etc. 2008-03-16T11:20:12-07:00

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Toby,  great stuff mate!  You are a legend.  I can't wait to see the donation tracking.  Actually Toby I might throw you a bit of a curve ball here but you may want to think about it.  How about head count of visitor/guest tracking? In reality attendance/visitor/donation tracking is all tracking of numbers.  It may be easier to have user definable 'tracking' fields?  Anyway for now I can store additional info in notes as attendance and donation is most important at this stage. 2008-03-16T19:21:40-07:00

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Mike: yeah, I'm thinking the flash charts would be part of a deeper reporting function and not the ones there for the quick overview. So yeah, the attendance thing definitely can get pretty deep. Here's my thinking on it up till now...like you said, there are two ways to track - by overall head count and by tracking each individual person's attendance. Obviously, the first version I've implemented is the overall head count version, which was a) pretty easy to implement since I had a lot of the foundation already there, and b) it's useful for a lot of things. For example, I just spoke to some folks at church this morning and they said they usually take a overall head count and write it down in a log book. It's a pretty big undertaking to track attendance to a normal Sunday worship service by each individual attendee I would think (has anyone here attempted that?) and the overall head count can show you the trends over time...for instance, I'm sure next Sunday will provide a pretty big spike for most churches :) So, having it tied to the events you already have entered into Stafftool and taking a couple seconds to enter it into that event after every meeting is already much better than writing them down into a log book, and there is a lot of room to go much farther than what's there now, like exporting to csv for further analysis in Excel, larger graphs, etc. But overall, it's a pretty simple approach. Now the individual tracking is another story. What i envision here is more involved...something along the lines of Facebook or Evite's system. Basically, you'll be able to send invitation type messages to people (probably the group or groups that the event is associated with) and then they can RSVP really easily... probably as simple as hitting a big "Yes", "Maybe" or "No" button in the email or internal message that will record their response to make it as easy to collect info as possible. This will let you get some semblance of how many people to expect at the event. Then, there are a few options from there. The way things like Facebook work, I believe, is that if people respond as a "Yes" they get recorded as though they attended if the date passes and they haven't changed it. We could do something like that, but I don't think that will provide enough accurate data. It'll be good for planning and maybe getting a head start on the data entry afterwards. So, that leaves the way to collect who actually attended. At this point I don't really see a way around either providing a list of everyone who was invited and checking them off (this could be eased by having some sort of autocomplete or something so you can start typing their name to narrow it down to them), using a similar autocomplete to just add the people who actually attended, or figuring out an nice easy way of doing the initial data collection directly into Stafftool. Perhaps something like a sign in computer in some sort of kiosk mode or something where people can just check in themselves, or a part of the iPhone interface that lets you count people right on your phone or something. This is where I'd love some ideas from you guys to get ideas of what would make this tedious task more bearable. And then, for reporting information back from this data, there's a lot we could potentially do. I've started with the basic charts for the overall attendance, but like Mike mentioned before, we could figure out ways of doing things like discovering people who are starting to become less involved, automatically flagging them, seeing their participation across different group events, etc. The possibilities are pretty endless, just need to figure out where to start. Mike, I'm curious, what makes you surprised that the attendance is already in Stafftool? Does it seem like it's heading in the wrong direction? 2008-03-16T21:07:52-07:00

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Hi Toby, Yes I think the basic attendance tracking is fine for the moment. Moving to individual tracking is a whole other kettle of fish.  I'm not sure if I like the "send an invite" strategy you are thinking of.  That would mean everyone has to be able to access stafftool.com?  I can't see that being a viable option.  This however would be a great system for event/group scheduling. For collecting data I think the best way is to do a combination of autocompletion and people listing with checkboxes to signify they attended.  You could do several things to make it easier: 1. Everyone how responded "YES" to the "send an invite" is automatically selected.  You can then untick if necessary. 2. The next time you go to enter individual attendance information, the system automatically selects those who attended last time.  Because generally the same people attend week in, week out.  You can then untick if necessary. Just some ideas I had.  You're doing a great job Toby!   2008-03-16T21:31:44-07:00

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Deckart, that brings up an interesting point. What do the rest of you think about that type of thing, tracking different groups' attendance, like visitors, members, etc. I think an easy way to do it would be to provide either a drop down or open text field that would let you label every entry, and maybe it would default to "Attendance" but you change it to whatever you need and enter multiple for the same day. The problem with that would be how to graph the separate tallies per day...we'd have to have a ahrt with multiple different colored lines or something like that. which is entirely possible, although there'd have to be a way to set what you're going to be tracking from the beginning so we'd know what to put on the chart...gonna have to think about this type of stuff some more. And Deckart, the idea I had for the first version of donation tracking will be similar to the overall headcount attendance tracking. The concept of types of donation or tagging makes even more sense here so you can put the donations into different buckets. 2008-03-16T21:45:54-07:00

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Hey Deckart, our posts crossed over the wire :) As for the invitation system, I'm actually thinking more along the lines of ever invitation that goes out gets a special token so that the recipient can respond without logging into or even having an account with Stafftool. I agree it would be really tough to make this available only to people who can log into the app, so I'd want to make it as seamless as possible. Now, of course, people who do have a Stafftool account can log in and update their status and things like that. Thanks for the feedback on the data entry stuff, interesting ideas... 2008-03-16T21:49:45-07:00

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Hey Toby. To answer you question, no, I do not think stafftool is going in the wrong direction, I love what you are doing with the program. I am surprised to see event tracking for two reasons. <ol> <li>there are still some basic functions/features that should be in the program (like anniversaries, more reports, documentation) that are really foundational and necessary </li> <li>until some of the other stuff (like the advanced group stuff, donation stuff, etc) is fleshed out it might be hard to know the best way to implement this. </li> </ol> I think there is a lot of overlap in the features and functions of the extended components of the program. For instance, donation tracking and event tracking are both items that can be tracked as a total count, however they BOTH can be tracked individually. And churches will probably want both. So to keep the program simple there has to be a common thread in the way each of the components works. To keep it simple it also should tie into the existing core components, like people, groups, events - seamlessly. Perhaps even use that structure as part of it's operational base. Every time you give us an update you enlarge our vision for the program. It is obvious that we are excited about what you are doing! So every time you give us a feature we are going to think of new ways to use that feature. Let me illustrate: <ul> <li>You gave us some great updates to the events input, like coordinator. Now we have a contact.</li> <li>You have just given us the ability to track attendance with that same event. <ul> <li>NOW, we are going to think of things like, "Can we add an alarm (like ical) to remind the event coordinator to update the event information after it takes place?" So they get an email/PM reminding them after NN days to type in their synopsis of the event in the notes field and add an attendance total so that we can get a snapshot of what took place.</li> </ul> </li> <li>All well and good... but you also gave us TAGS for events... so I am going to want to USE that data even more. <ul> <li>Now I am going to wonder, "Can I filter all of the events tagged 'women' and see the dates, notes, coordinators and attendance for each and somehow get a visual (because we like charts)</li> </ul> </li> </ul> There is SO much that can be done with the structure you have in place. And because of that, people like me and Sam are going to continue to throw ideas your way. HOW to integrate it all and what the big picture will be when all of these components are in place is something I have not been able to fully think through - though I am sure you have. I would just hate to see you put time into programming and have to redo it if the program migrated a different way as it grew. [I think "Marital Status" is a good example. It is there, even though there is a relationship section, and will be because people are using it.] Once people invest weeks/months into attendance tracking they are not going to want to do it over if the system needs to change. 2008-03-17T04:53:49-07:00

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Hi Toby, I like your ideas for "user defined" tracking.  And yes you'd have to think how is the best way to display it in the graph because the Y axis is quite different if you had them all on one chart. Good idea on providing 'non-stafftool' responses to invites.  I'm not too sure how hard that is but it sounds good.  I'm still not convinced how many people would reply but at least it's another option. Either way I think it is amazing that you are seeing these requests and then actually developing them!  I love it! 2008-03-17T19:18:51-07:00

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an average for the year's attendance would be great! 2008-04-09T11:07:58-07:00

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Kye, that would actually be really easy, and I think pretty helpful. I'll work on integrating the average attendance into there for the next push. Now, does the year's attendance make a difference, or would an overall average be adequate for now? I know that detailed info will be great in the future with reporting and everything, but for the general overview to go along with the chart, I'm thinking just an overall average would be good enough for there. Again, though, if you guys think a specific time frame would be better (last year, year-to-date, last quarter, etc) let me know - you guys are the experts on what will be most helpful. 2008-04-10T00:14:45-07:00

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Hey guys... WOW, this feed is getting long! 8-) Toby, here is what I track... <ol> <li>For small groups: average weekly attendance. This is kept by the small group leader.</li> <li>Sunday service(s): total attendance & # first time visitors. I keep this for every week of the year</li> <li>Sunday service(s): weekly average/per month of attendance & visitors [not, I keep this for offerings, too]</li> <li>Sunday service(s): a chart of monthly averages/per quarter and /per year for visitor, attendance and offerings.</li> </ol> <div>I can email you one of my reports if you want, I just completed first quarter for our business meeting. It is pretty simple. I enter all of this into a Numbers sheet (used to use Excel). However, if all of this could be entered into stafftool I could possibly DO something with it - and I could track small groups better, as well as individual involvement. Ah... the dream goes on. 8-)</div> 2008-04-10T05:06:11-07:00

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In the past I have found a rolling average of the last twelve months to be the most useful. What really cool is a line chart of the moving average overlaid a bar chart of weekly attendance. 2008-04-10T11:14:15-07:00

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Hey Michael, that'd be great if you could send me those reports, I'd love to see some real life examples of what churches are tracking. Sam, ok cool, I can do the rolling average of the last 12 months really easily...in fact that's already finished so I can roll it out soon. I'm wondering if it should be in the attendance tab or if I should go ahead and place the 12 month average right in the details card itself for events that are being tracked... 2008-04-10T12:08:19-07:00

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Maybe a bit of both? I don't know. 2008-04-11T06:19:12-07:00

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Hey Sam, yeah, I put it on the main info card if the event is tracking attendance, as well as within the main attendance tab. The average if for the last 12 months. 2008-04-12T01:20:34-07:00

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Nice, you are creating a very friendly program. 2008-04-12T10:10:29-07:00

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