Experience.FellowshipOne.com

Fellow F1ers,

We are at Park Community Church are in the early stages of implementing F1 and with that comes a lot of patience in figuring out how to use this tool to the fullest potential.  We are beginning to manage our Small Groups and it's occured to us that we need to know some best practices. 

We are wondering if churches out there are removing an individual's participant assignment when they are no longer in a small group?  We discovered that removing the participant assignment deletes record that the individual was ever in a small group and while we do want to remove the assignment, we also do want to maintain record that the individual was in a small group so we can keep track of where our people have been for assimilation purposes.

Let me know if you have encountered this.

Many thanks,

Alisha Rylander

 

Alisha,

  Are you recording attendance for any of these people?  If so, that would be your record that they were a member of the small group.  Attendance would be permanent where the assignment could change as people may "try out" small groups or perhaps a group grows and breaks into two groups.  In that case, you'd know that a person had attended one group regularly and had changed the group for some reason or completely stopped attending.

 

In Him,

-Peter Schott
 

Hi Alisha, We are currently developing some strategies and best pratice methods for managing our almost 200 small groups in F1. Peter is correct. Currently "Particpant History" is only kept has attendance records in F1. We are toying with the idea of just posting attendance for one of the weeks the group met and using that has history. I am trying to get buy-in from our small group coaches and leaders on the idea of using Small Group Manager to post attendance whenever the group meets.

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IT Director
Discovery Chruch, Orlando
bob@discoverychurch.org

Peter & Bob-

 Thanks so much for your post to my inquiry.  We actually are not tracking attendance yet, hopefully, at some point this year we will be rolling out weblink to our small group leaders so they can manage their small groups.  So it sounds like there's not a real good way to manage this if you're not tracking attendance.  We'll have to decide which direction to go and may implement the idea Bob has.

 Thanks again!

Alisha Rylander

The only possible issue I can see with just using one week to record attendance is that you could easily miss people who missed a week.  I can't really think of a good way around that other than to perhaps collect attendance sheets from small group leaders and have someone do a Post-Attendance on the small groups.

That's relatively easy to do, but if you have a large number of small-groups, it would get quite time-consuming. The
good thing is that you can easily pull up a list of people assigned to the group and record attendance for existing members without too much trouble.  New members would take a little longer, but would still be manageable.

Giving this to your small group leaders makes the most sense, but I can see that getting buy-in would be difficult as it would be a new process to follow and there would be some training required. I feel that the benefits are high, though. It's easy to know that John hasn't shown up in "a while", but a lot better to know that he really hasn't shown up for the last 4 weeks. Has anyone checked on him in that time?  Is he okay?  Maybe your groups do well keeping track of those sorts of things already, but from experience, it's easy to just figure that he may have gone out of town or been sick and will be back "next time".  Meanwhile, next time turns into quite a long time and John feels like nobody cared enough to check on him. He's moved on to another small group or perhaps just stopped going altogether.

If you have a manageable number, you may want to try this with them to see what you can work with. Perhaps starting with a couple of "pilot" small groups and building up from there would help others to see that it's not hard to do and has benefits beyond just plugging numbers into the system.

 In Him,

-Peter 

I strongly agree with Peter. Specific is always better than vague. If "John" has 6 months of attending 3 out of four weeks and than drops off to 1 week every month then something happened in John life that he not telling anyone. As a small group leader you then have the opportunity to be pro-active.

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IT Director
Discovery Chruch, Orlando
bob@discoverychurch.org