Take A Census

FTDeliverySvcs — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Attendance carries the stigma from your school days where everyone had to be in class and everyday attendance was taken.

Census means that on some interval of your choosing you stop and count how many people are actually involved in this activity. Like the US census taken every ten years you can choose any interval you want and ask "how many people are in small groups?"

To do this you need to setup your activity schedule to reflect when you want your census taken and not which days of the week your small groups meet. Consider a census on a quarterly basis; you would create an activity schedule that occurs on March 31, June 30, September 30 and December 31. The idea is you communicate with your small group leaders to post attendance 4 times in the year. the small group leader can still use the manager tool weekly for email, contacts and membership purposes within the group but you as a church only want a quarterly census to track if the groups as a whole are growing or not.

You can adjust the census dates to any duration or interval. Maybe monthly or bi-monthly is more in line with how often you want your census. You can even build the schedule on an as needed basis. Suppose you launch a new small groups’ series in September and you want a census in December you can add that date to your activity schedule for the leaders to post attendance to. Then you can add another date the following spring to see how the groups are doing again.

At this point you may be thinking how do I know when my groups are meeting if my activity schedule is set up for census taking and the not weekly meetings? If you need to know what day a group meets or even what time of day you can use Room Location Properties to track this information. By defining properties and choices and then making the associations between them and your small groups you know who meets when, where and even why (special interests).

If you are not taking attendance today with your small groups consider taking a census instead.

Jeremy Jackson

Delivering Change : attendance

Take A Census