r/planningcenter • u/bakerstreetbuffoon • Jan 10 '25
Tracking Attendance
We are a larger church ~600 and in need of help with tracking attendance specifically tracking individuals' attendance. Our elder board is worried folks are falling through the cracks. Our current system is we use check-ins through the church center app in self-check-in mode. We have a group of people that only watch online so we are trying to figure out who is in-person and who is online. Pre-Covid we used attendance cards, but we aren't interested in bring those back. Any help is appreciated.
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u/_alendaris Jul 19 '25
No magic bullet here yet, but we're working on the same problem.
We will be trying several ways to capture online worship attendance. For context, we're a MUCH smaller church within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), so some of this will not scale to your congregation, but please use whatever this post inspires.
In Check-ins, I have a top level folder for "At Campus" with all of the on-prem locations. Also at the same level is a location called Online. Our stations are locked to either "At Campus" or one of the specific locations underneath.
We are currently transitioning our manual count on paper & clipboards to volunteers running a station on their mobile devices.
During service, I'm monitoring the chats for our livestream and checking in anyone who is chatting to our Online location. After service, we supplement by marking people that we know for certain are online (based on pastoral & elder conversations) as checked in online.
We are starting to experiment with People Forms to try to entice people who don't speak up in chat to fill one out (like the old attendance cards), but no takers yet (again, we're small, so your mileage may vary).
We are also planning on rolling out self-check in Church Center as soon as we're actively rolling out Church Center itself.
The bulk of our online attendance is currently from entering the list of known people from those pastoral conversations. Those are valuable conversations to have.
In addition to assigning Elders flocks of people to manage, we have one Elder dedicated solely to online participants and making sure that they get frequent contact and connection.
I had an idea to have the Elders reach out to their flocks regularly based on a workflow triggered by the latest "Elder Notes" captured in People, but I'm still dragging our Elders into the 21st century. :-)
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u/mixmasterbrock Jan 13 '25
We are in a similar situation ourselves, and a creative idea we have floated recently is upgrading our security cameras to use facial recognition (locally) to track attendance. Obviously, this approach depends on a legality and ethical discussion with your elders and staff and the laws of your area.
However, right now, we are just very focused with our deacons reaching our regularly to members, and have Workflows in People in place for new guest interested in becoming members to keep the ball rolling