Tracking Regular Attenders

[laura ehling]

Once attenders reach the status of "Regular Attender", can anyone provide feedback on how they are validating this data long term?    My database currently has 2,516 records of "Regular Attenders" but our church is only averaging 1,300 on a weekend (with 898 being members).

That being said, I don't trust and can't accurately report on Regular Attender participation.   If people don't have kids and are not giving, how do you track if they are even attending?

Just looking for any guidance.   

[Raymond Masse]

We have the same issue.  Certainly purchasing and using Elexio's Check-In system would for solve the problem, as long as everyone uses it.  We are a much smaller church than yours and we've held off implementing Check-in for fear of it being wasted money if people don't use it and we are concerned that folks may feel that they are being "tracked", which they are to a certain extent.

[laura ehling]

We do use the Elexio check-in for children's ministry (and love it).    The only thing we have not done is actually pushed it to the congregation side of the house.   Is anyone using this tool on the auditorium side?

[bken...@tomoka.cc]

Hi, Laura. This is definitely an issue. We do monthly reports that show people who are regular attenders, but we have no record of their involvement in 3 months. We then give that report to several of our pastors to look through and mark off people they know have been attending. Once we narrow it down, we send out "praying for you" postcards and update their status to "visitor." We also run monthly reports on visitors who have attended (or gave) more than three times in three months and make them regular attenders. It sounds like a lot, but really people don't go back and forth between those statuses that much. That seems to work for us to keep it more accurate. Obviously, it's not fool proof since some people like to stay under the radar. 

Our methods for gathering information are attendance (we have volunteers that use connection cards to enter attendance each week for individuals), children/volunteer check-in, and giving. We do not have check-in kiosks and feel pretty sure people wouldn't use them if we had them. We do have the app and and people can check-in on that, but it is underused. I hope this helps. 

[Josiah Rocke]

We use a report that looks at the following filters over a 3 month span:

1. Individual attendance

2. Household Attendance

3. Household giving

4. Small group involvement

5. Ministry team involvement.

That said, a general rule of thumb is that only 1/3 to 1/2 of your adult "regular attenders/members" will show up any given sunday. I'm not sure who said that is a rule, but it holds true for us! We have 1650 adult members/regular attenders, and though our "Sunday attendance" runs 1400-1500, kids make up a huge percentage and several hundred are counted twice (two service hours with Sunday School classes offered during both...many attend a class and go to church or vice versa). So my estimate based on the data I can gather is only 600-800 adults show up each Sunday, which is right on with 1/3-1/2.

We do have "Connection Cards" which we put in the bulletin for people to mark attendance, submit prayer requests, request info, etc and we are able to register a couple hundred in attendance for each service that way. It's not an exact science, but our record keeping has definitely improved. We are still working on the "following up with missing faces" part...We have used the data to move 50+ people from regular attenders to becoming members because of the data though. That's been encouraging!

[Robert Jones]

We created events for all of our weekly services about a year ago. We don't have the check-in stations, just used the app.

We mentioned it a few times from the pulpit when we first started and offered a free mp3 of the service if they checked in. We never did a heavy push and have rarely mentioned it from the pulpit since, with that said we have about 100 people (out of 800-100 people) each week that check in with the app.

[Josiah Rocke]

We also have this as an option. I sold check how many of those with registered attendance come from paper vs the app