Something I’ve been planning for a long time is the ability to track attendance for events. Just basic head counts collected over time. Every Sunday at church I see a volunteer in the back, pen in hand, counting each person and writing the tally down. Perhaps it gets put into a spreadsheet, perhaps just written down in a book. Either way it’s nice information to have and I thought Stafftool would be a great place to keep track of it all, however, it wasn’t something that made it into the initial launch. Recently, though, some of the great users in the support forums were asking about and discussing Event Attendance Tracking and it got me excited about it getting it going now that it looked like it was indeed something that people needed. So, I’m happy to announce a first pass “preview” of attendance tracking.
So, while there were some great ideas brought up in the thread that I have plans to discuss and explore further, I really wanted to get some simple functionality out there right away so you all could start kicking the tires. Essentially, you can now set any event to track attendance. This makes most sense on repeating events, such as Sunday service, as you’ll soon see, but you can also record attendance on a single event if you’d like as well. To do so, just check the new box in the event form and update.
This will enable attendance tracking for that event, which you can see in the new tab that appears in its info card.
No, the first time you click on that tab for an event, you’ll be greeted with an empty chart and attendance table, along with a little quick entry form at the bottom.
Your cursor will already be focused on the number entry field, and today’s date will already be selected. So, if you’re recording your service’s attendance right after service, all you’ll have to do is type in the number and hit return and it’ll be added. You’ll notice that the chart right below the tabs will update. It won’t look like much the first time, but over time you’ll start to see some trends. For now, it will max out at showing you the attendance trend for the most recent 10 dates you’ve entered. Here’s a sample of an event that has 10 attendance tally entries:
As you can see the chart is very simple and just meant to show you the general trends over time. The top of the chart is denoted with the highest count during that time period to give you some context.
That’s pretty much it at this point…really basic, but really useful to start keeping track in one place and get a quick overview of how things are going. I have more plans for improving what’s there now, and like I said, the discussion on the forums has a lot of great things to consider for future enhancements…but let me know what you think so far!
Hi Toby, this looks good. What other planned developments are on the cards for the next couple of months?
Just want to drop you a note to say I found this site after seeing your advertisement in my twitterific feed.
You seem to really be on to some things. I’m encouraged to see someone taking a fresh approach to church management! I’d love to learn more about where you envision this product heading. Give me a shout if you’ve got a minute and perhaps we can talk on the phone?
Rich Barrett Access Church a strategic partner of North Point Ministries
Toby, I was wondering about tracking attendance for individuals and groups. I work in Family Ministry and was thinking about check-in and attendance tracking for children
For example, lets say you have a group of 5th graders that meets every week with two adult leaders. Is there a way to create an attendance roster (print out) that people can use to sign in? Is there a way to then go back to Stafftool and enter that attendance so that you can see who is in that group and track their attendance over time?
Rich and AdamF - first off, I apologize… your comments got caught i the blog spam filter and went unseen until very recently.
Rich, I just sent you an email, I’d love to chat with you about Stafftool and where I’d like to see it head.
AdamF - at this time there’s no specific support for that use case, however, I do intend to have individual attendance in the future… I’ve actually been working on a pretty big update to the app that will be coming some time soon with some of these features. When that feature is in place, the printing of a roster wouldn’t be too hard (you could do it now by filtering your people by group and then clicking the Print button), check that off and then come back and enter who was there. The vision is that, once individual tracking is in place for events, there can be a report or chart in place that lists all the people and plots their attendance. If there are specific type of ways to visualize this, please let me know!