Managing small group attendance

This opens the attendance record to View.

Historic attendance records are maintained in the Attendance section. The Advanced Search can be used to locate historic attendance records of interest. Note also the attendance Actions to View, Edit or Delete an attendance.

Top Tip!

You can also Add attendance from the Attendance tab of a group profile. Recent Attendance is shown and can be further filtered. You can open an attendance record to View by clicking on the Date heading - ideal if you need to correct a mistake.

Adding attendance through My ChurchSuite

Group members assigned the Attendance Submission role permission can add attendance for their group through My ChurchSuite without needing wider access to your admin-facing Small Groups module. Empowering your groups to maintain attendance helps reduce the administrative burden on the office, providing valuable statistical data about your small group ministry and historical safeguarding records of those in attendance.

Attendance submission through My ChurchSuite is first enabled for a role. Typically, attendance submission permission is granted for a "Leader" role, but by adding a specific "Attendance Submitter" role, someone else in a group could be assigned responsibility for adding and managing attendance for their group. Working in ChurchSuite, navigate to the Roles section and click Add role (or Edit an existing role).

Give the role a suitable Name and tick the Attendance Submission option. For further information on the other role permissions available, see our related support article Assigning small group roles.

You can optionally enable Attendance Submission for multiple roles if you need to, meaning other group members can add attendance for their group. Click to Save the role changes. From a role View, navigate back to the Roles section of the module. From here, note the option to re-order roles if you wish - click any Order icon and use the up-down controls in the pop-up to set a preferred role order. Note also the role Actions to View, Edit, and Delete.

The final task is to assign an attendance submission role to one or more members of each small group that is visible in My ChurchSuite. Navigate to the Groups section of the module, and for each group, select View from the group Actions. From the group View, click on the Members tab.

To assign a role, click on the space under the Roles column for that member. Available roles are shown in grey, and assigned roles are changed to blue. Choose the appropriate roles to assign and click Save.

Repeat the above steps for each small group, assigning an attendance submission role to the appropriate members. Assigned role holders with Attendance Submission permission for My ChurchSuite can now add attendance for their group. We've produced a My ChurchSuite User Guide that explains how assigned role holders can add attendance for their group through My ChurchSuite. Here's a brief overview of the workflow:

From the Attendance tab of a group View, click Add attendance.

On the Add attendance pop-up, choose the attendance Date. Attendance can only be added to for a date that hasn't already been added. Note also the option to record that the group Didn't Meet? on the selected date - which prevents the group from showing on the Missing Attendance report - or tick the Attendees. As you tick or untick names, the Number of Attendees auto-updates. Optionally add details of group visitors in the Notes field. To include those visitors in the group attendance count, you must manually adjust the No. of Attendees accordingly. Click Save to add the attendance.

Previously added attendance can be edited to correct a mistake or add notes. To do this, click the pencil icon for a Date in the attendance table to open that attendance to view. The table shows the most recent 12 weeks of attendance only.

Small group attendance reporting

Missing Attendance

Of course, attendance reports are only helpful if attendance data has been added! The Missing Attendance report will help you identify groups that haven't submitted attendance for a chosen amount of time. Good leaders are often busy, so they may appreciate a periodic reminder to help them stay organised before attendance slips their minds!

Several other Attendance reports are available in the module's Reports section:

Attendance Averages report

This report displays the attendance averages of individual members of your small groups over a range of Dates. It can be filtered to show just those in groups in selected Clusters, Groups or Labels, making it an ideal tool for identifying people who may be beginning to slip away from a particular small group.

Attendance Notes report

This report shows a list of notes added as part of attendance submissions. You can filter notes added within a range of attendance Dates and optionally drill down to the notes of specific Clusters, Groups or Labels.

Attendance Summary report

The Attendance Summary shows inline attendance for each group member within a given range based on the Number of weeks and Ending on a date. Using the same presentation of attendance data found on group "View" pages, this report shows you who was present or not recorded present on each date filtered.

Exceptional Groups report

This report allows you to define Low attendance and High attendance criteria that you consider 'exceptional'. The report shows each group's average attendance, presented monthly, matching those criteria, enabling you to visualise group trends that might be a cause for concern, groups that may benefit from some logistical planning, or who are a cause for celebration! The exceptional results are shown in red or green, making it easy to distinguish the attendance health of each group over time.

Monthly Breakdown report

This report enables you to visualise long-term attendance trends across your Small Groups.

Below the graph is a summary of the supporting statistics showing the highest and lowest attendance data displayed alongside the numerical average and the total number of attendance records.

Engagement report

Whether you have many groups or only a few, Small Group Ministry is all about engagement, and this report is packed with valuable insights. You can visualise the number of unique contacts, children and visitors in attendance each month. While the Monthly Breakdown report is useful for showing the total number of group member attendees each month, that number only tells part of the story. The Engagement report shows how that number is comprised, distinguishing regular contacts and children and visitors - giving you a clearer visualisation of your ministry's reach. The report can be further filtered by Labels so you can see how well a particular category or type of group engages with new people!

Engagement report statistics explained

For context, it's helpful to remember the scope of the attendance data you are collecting for each group. The number of group visitors is the difference between the total number of group members marked as attending and the total number of people recorded as actually in attendance on a date-by-date basis. Consider the example below: all 7 group members are ticked as attending, but the actual number in attendance is 9 - the group leaders have helpfully added a note that there were visitors. Mathematically, we assume there were two visitors, i.e. 9 - 7 = 2.

However, from this number, we don't know who the visitors were, whether they've visited the group before or since, or whether they were just 'one-offs'. Therefore, we don't know if they're unique to just this one date or if they're returning visitors across a range of dates.

The Engagement report does this same calculation across every attendance record for every group, summarising each calendar month within the range of dates filtered in the report. The system considers missing attendance, showing results based on attendance data present, which means the results are not skewed because of missing attendance. So if attendance has only been recorded for three weeks in a particular month, the calculation is based on a 3-week month; similarly, the system considers four and five-week months.

With the Engagement report, it's helpful not to think in terms of attendance but rather of how many people are reached through your small group ministry - emphasis on "potentially" - more in a moment!

Let's consider an example: Based on attendance added for "Group A" for a particular month, ChurchSuite has mathematically calculated that the group had visitors of 2, 3, 0 and 4 across four consecutive weeks of a month. We can't determine "who" those visitors were, and the data doesn't tell us whether the visitors were unique individuals, each attending one-off or whether some were repeat visitors.

However, we can determine that the minimum number of unique visitors for the month had to be at least 4 people (although it might have been more people; it couldn't be less than 4 as 4 unique visitors were recorded as attending on the 4th week)

We can also determine that the maximum number of unique visitors for the month couldn't be more than 9 people, i.e. there were 2+3+0+4 visitors (assuming they were all one-off visitors), but it could have been less than 9 people with some repeat visitors - we just don't know from the data.

We can also calculate the average number of visitors during the month from a simple average of the number of visitors across dates with visitors, i.e. (2+3+4) / 3 weeks = 3.

Bringing together each of these metrics, the Engagement report can show the potential reach, an alternative way of viewing group attendance data, distinguishing known member attendance and extrapolating potential visitor reach on a month-by-month basis.

Rounding out the example: For one group for one month, we can see that in addition to the known group member attendance (based on the actual 'ticked' attendance data), the group also reached between 4 and 9 visitors and that the group had an average of 3 visitors on any given date where visitors did attend. Again, we don't know who the individuals were, but we can say that the actual visitor reach was between 4 and 9 (although if visitor names were added by leaders in the attendance Notes, you could get closer to the actual visitor reach, however, this would require collating lots of data!)

This example considers a single group in isolation for one month. The Engagement report matches results across all of your groups and calculates the total of each group's minimum and maximum visitor reach within a range of dates, giving you powerful insight into the true reach of your small group ministry!