Adding and managing attendance gatherings

Introduction

The Attendance module is the core repository for maintaining historic attendance data for each of your gatherings. You can also optionally track the personal attendance of Address Book contacts at your gatherings, but at its simplest level, the module records key attendance metrics. From the data collected, you can produce insightful reports and visualise attendance trends.

The building blocks for collecting data in the Attendance module are Gatherings, Metricsets, and Metrics:

Gatherings are the headings under which attendance for each date is grouped, totalled and reportable. You'll typically add a gathering for each occasion where people gather in person or online for a service or event and for which you want to maintain a record of attendance for each date the gathering meets for reporting purposes. Multi-site users will add site-specific gatherings for each distinct site/location. When 'people tracking' is enabled, you can also maintain a register of attendees for each date the gathering meets.

For each gathering, you'll define the Metrics of interest, e.g., "Adults" and "Visitor Cards", and choose whether a metric should be included or excluded from the total for each date. In this way, you can collect metric data for a gathering that doesn't relate to the attendance total for a date. For example, you could count cars in the car park or visitor connection cards and exclude those metric values from the attendance 'total' for the gathering on each date. All metrics are reportable, even if excluded from the attendance total for a gathering.

Metrics are grouped into Metricsets. A gathering can comprise one or more metricsets. In the following example - the setup for a 'hybrid' gathering - there are three metricsets to record the in-person and online elements of the gathering.

Adding and managing gatherings

Working within the Gatherings section, click Add gathering:

On the Add gathering pop-up, enter a suitable Name, select a preferred Colour to distinguish the gathering on views and reports, and for multi-site customers, select the gathering Site. Finally, tick to enable People Tracking for Address Book contacts for this gathering. Click Save to add the gathering.

The gathering View is shown. Click Edit if you need to make changes to the gathering settings. The Attendance tab shows empty until attendance for the gathering has been added. Before adding attendance, switch to the Setup tab to add the Metricsets and Metrics for the statistics you wish to record for the gathering. This is explained in the next section.

Finally, in this section, returning to the Gatherings list, note the options to switch between the list of Active and Archived gatherings. From here, you can Add other gatherings and View, Edit, Archive, or Delete a gathering. We encourage you to archive unwanted gatherings rather than delete them, which is a destructive action that will also delete all associated attendance data.

Adding and managing metricsets and metrics

In the last section, we added a gathering. We'll now add Metricsets and Metrics for each attendance statistic you wish to collect for the gathering. Each gathering must have at least one metricset and one metric. From the Gatherings section of the module, open a gathering to View and click on the Setup tab. Click Add metricset:

Give your metricset a Name. In this example, for a 'Sunday 10.30am' gathering, the first metricset will be for metrics collected in the 'Main Auditorium'. Click Save.

Next, click Add metric to add each of the statistics for this metricset. For example, you might add metrics for 'Adults' and 'Children', which will be used to collect the attendance 'counts' of those present in the auditorium.

On the Add metric pop-up, enter a suitable Name and choose the metric Type. You can collect metric data as Number values or Currency values. Currency metrics are ideal for recording details of the 'offering' collected at the gathering. When later adding attendance, the metric values are aggregated to produce the metricset total for each type set to Include in total, but you can exclude certain metrics from the metricset totals if you wish. In this way, you can set up a metricset that will collect attendance and non-attendance data, with only the attendance metrics totalled for each type. For example, you might add Number metrics for 'Adults' and 'Children' that are totalled, but also collect metrics for 'Visitor Connection Cards' that are excluded from the metricset total. Click Save to add the metric.

For a Gathering with People tracking enabled, you can optionally Smart linka metric to auto-update the data from a selected source. This option isn't shown when people tracking is disabled. In this way, rather than manually entering metric values to record attendance, you can lock the metric so that it auto-populates with the data from people tracking as you tick the names of attendees. Note that only Address Book contacts can be tracked, so smart linking is only suitable for contact metrics. A smart linked metric is locked and cannot be manually populated with data - the metric data is populated as you tick or untick names when recording people tracking. See the article Adding attendance for a gathering for further information on how this works.

Continue adding metrics and metricsets as required for the gathering. It's helpful to remember that attendance reports can be filtered by gathering and also more granularly by metricset and metric. If your reporting needs later change, you can easily Move metrics between metricsets in the same gathering, Move metricsets between gatherings, Archive metrics and metricsets that are no longer in use, and Set as active again if necessary without losing the related attendance data.

Finally, note that metrics and metricsets can be reordered within a gathering by dragging the item 'Name' into the preferred order position.

Having added each of your gatherings and set up the metricsets and metrics to record data, you're now ready to begin collecting attendance data - see the related support article Adding gathering attendance.

Top Top! Managing legacy attendance data

Customers with historic attendance data collected with the module's legacy functionality using Categories and Groups will see their data has been automatically migrated to Gatherings, Metricsets and Metrics. Legacy 'Categories' have been migrated to site-specific Gatherings and Metricsets, and each legacy 'Group' has been migrated to Metrics in the relevant Metricset. Historic attendance data is unaffected by this migration.

Working from the Setup tab of each gathering View - and as you explore the migrated gatherings, metricsets and metrics - note the available actions to move metrics between metricsets and move metricsets between existing gatherings or to a new gathering, if you wish. As you move metrics and metricsets, historical attendance and any people tracking data are retained intact and also moved.

You can archive gatherings, metricsets and metrics that are no longer needed - they can be set active again if you later find you need them. Historic attendance data for archived gatherings, metricsets and metrics continue to be searchable, visible and editable in the module but are no longer shown when adding new attendance records or in reports. We encourage you to carefully consider before you delete gatherings, metricsets or metrics, as this will immediately delete all related attendance data - if in doubt, archive!

Metricset actions: The Move action:

Metric actions: The Move action: