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We are trying to better organize our statuses and sub-statuses and are coming up with some issues having to do with our youth ministry. Right now, the youth ministry has it's own status with sub-statuses under that (infrequent attender, infrequent sunday am attender, visitor, etc.) These are for when someone from the youth ministry primarily just attends the youth ministry and either attends a different church on Sunday mornings or does not attend a church on Sunday mornings at all. Then we have a status under our regular attenders that is regular attender main church and youth ministry. Then we have an inactive status with the youth ministry as a sub-status for youth that only attended the youth ministry and are now inactive. Then we have another status of member/youth ministry so that we know that they attend the youth ministry and are also a member of the church.

 This works great for reporting purposes, but we are finding that we need to keep creating more statuses and sub-statuses and it is getting confusing for our data entry people what they should select for each person.

 

If we tracked attendance for the youth ministry it would probably take care of this, but we do not have check-in at this time. We have not come up with a good way to get an accurate attendance any other way.

 One option that we came up with as a possible solution to this was to create an attribute that is for the youth ministry and track all attenders of any type in the youth ministry that way. Then we would keep the status options to just those that attend on a Sunday morning. If a youth does not attend on a Sunday morning then their status would be inactive but they would have an attribute to the youth ministry. I am a little concerned how this would work for reporting purposes.

 So I have a few questions:

1. What are other ministries doing to track their youth ministry?

2. What types of statuses do you use?

3. What do you think of the attribute option?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Lauren Wood

Church of the Living God

Manchester, CT

We try to keep our statuses to a minimum.  We do not have a different status for our youth or student ministries as we call it.  We use the same ones for them as we do adults.  Those being, Member, Attendee, Inactive, Deceased, etc.  Just remember that you can always get someone's attendance records by running reports or doing queries or by even viewing their attendance to know if they are frequent attenders or not.  I am not sure I understand the need for so many different statuses. 

Sorry, I just realized that you said you don't use check-in at this time.  Is someone posting attendance for you after your meetings?

 We did decide to just use the statuses for our Sunday morning services and if a student does not attend Sunday morning, but does attend our youth service then they are given a special status so that they are not marked as "inactive." We then track whether the student is a new visitor or a regular attender through Attributes. We have been using this system for a couple of weeks now and it seems to be working well.

At the moment we are not taking attendance for our main youth service. I am thinking about starting to do that, but I think I would just have a couple of computers set up with volunteers checking people in directly to F1 through the "post attendance" option. I would like to keep track of this attendance, but wonder if I will really get good buy in from students since they would have to "check in" each week. I was considering doing a once a month drawing for everyone that checked in and for each week they check in their name is entered into the drawing. The only issue with that is that I really don't want to continue to do this long term. Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help and input!

Lauren Wood

Church of the Living God

Manchester, CT

www.clgonline.net

 

Lauren,

As a best practice, I would avoid using attributes to store status information. Concepts like Visitor and Regular Attender clearly fall into the people status domain. As the other poster suggested, using the same statuses for children, youth and adults is usually best, otherwise the status grows uncontrollably as you have mentioned.

With that said, I know some churches don't consider students regularly attending a church youth program as regular attenders of the church. That sounds like your case. If so, I usually recommend a Special Events status to hold people who attend something sponsored by the church but have another church home or simply aren't considered to be attenders of the church. Youth attenders would fall into that category. A participant assignment into an activity would let you know what event they are involved with whether you take attendance or not. This is best practice.

I hope this helps. If you would like to talk more extensively about best practices, we offer consulting services by the hour which can be purchased on the EDUCATION tab of this website.

Thanks,

---

Jeff Rice
Director, Delivery Services
Fellowship Technologies
www.fellowshiptech.com

Lauren,

You can always post the attendance to the youth meetings if you don't utilize check in. By doing this, there are all kinds of reports that will give you attendance history for your youth. Have a sign in sheet at the door, have all the kids sign in and then the following day go into F1 and post the attendance. This way you can run reports or query on who attended.

 We don't have any status' for youth. We try to keep our status' very simple. Attender (attends Sunday service), Event Prospect (doesn't attend Sunday service but is presently or has in the past attended an event), Past Attender  (no longer attends Sunday service), Visitor (visitor to Sunday service and will be moved to Attender after attending regularly), Member (official member of church). I think you get the point. So, a youth who doesn't attend Sunday service but attends youth group would have the status Event Prospect. So far this simple formula has worked for us.

The attribute idea will work as long as you have someone that is keeping the information current. Attributes are static information and are only viable if they are manually being updated on a regular basis. Attributes are very easy to query and report on, so that's definitely a possibility.

I hope this helps you!

Karen Estabrook

Grace Brethren Church

Columbus, OH