Experience.FellowshipOne.com

I would like to know how others are managing participant assignments. Are you deleting them once the event has concluded or are you leaving them as a sudo "history"?

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IT Director
Discovery Chruch, Orlando
bob@discoverychurch.org

We started using F1 in the spring of this year and I help in the student ministry.  I left the participant assignments in place for the various activities to have a quick history to see.  The only one changed was the Sunday morning student service, the students are listed by grade level so I promoted them to their next grade and in doing so the previous participant assignment was removed.

A good rule of thumb is "assignments are temporary, attendance is permanent". You can leave participant assignments in place but always rely on attendance for the concrete history of a person's involvement. As jaine mentioned in her post, assignments can be changed in a variety of ways, Move Assignments being one of them. Attendance is not so easily changed. It requires a manual process that must be done deliberately and thus provides a more accurate picture of the involvement history of the individual.

Hope this helps!

Tara Coulson

Fellowship Technologies Education Services

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Tara Coulson
Learning Specialist
Fellowship Technologies

Are you recommending participant assignments be removed after the end of the event?  

Also, what about staffing assignments?   We have been inactivating the staffing assignment not removing them.  What would be the advantage of removing the assignment instead of inactivating it?

Thanks so much!

Jaine

From a data standpoint, I think you are doing the right thing.  This will enable you to see a history of anyone who was ever assigned to an activity, regardless of whether or not they actually served/posted attendance.  This is useful to see who registered for events, but didn't make it or who could be scheduled to work for an activity, but never actually has.  If you make the record inactive, but the person changes their mind later, you can re-activate that record without too much trouble.

The only big reasons I've heard for removing assignments are incorrect assignments (testing, data entry error, etc) or just having too many old assignments that aren't relevant anymore and are affecting portal usage or reports.  I still tend to argue against removing anything just because of the possible data value at a later point.  I've been in too many situations where the decision was made to not keep data and then it was realized that we actually wanted/needed that data for analysis later on.  At that point, the backups were too old to retrieve anything past a couple of months and we ended up paying a pretty large sum to have someone process the data based on what we had retained.

In Him,

-Peter Schott 

Hi Jaine,

I'm sorry if I gave the impression that it was better to remove assignments, I was simply noting the fact that it is fairly easy for a user with ministry access to change or delete an assignment, whereas attendance was not so easily changed. I agree with Peter; keep your assignments until they are no longer relevant to the participant/staff member. You are absolutely doing the right thing by inactivating staffing assignments. This will give accurate staffing reports (if you select to filter out all "inactive" assignments) and it will be much easier to re-activate an assignment when a volunteer is able to serve again rather than having to create the staff assignment all over again.

God bless,

Tara

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Tara Coulson
Learning Specialist
Fellowship Technologies

We currently are leaving our participant assignments on.  I work with our family ministry and if you want to pull a list to "call through" for camp or dnow etc...it is easy to pull a report of who has attended in the past.  So far it is data we still want to capture.

 

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Janna Johnson
Community Life Church
Family Ministry Assistant
972-564-5433

We are keeping our participant assignments also. The problem we are running into is that when we go to record attendance for the following year's activity, it will pull kids associated from the previous years as well.

Is there a way to pull only the current year?  We are concerned this may be a glitch we are experiencing...

 

Thanks!

 

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Kristin Jepson

I ran into the same "issue" Kristin asked about.  An easy solution I found was to add "2007-2008" to the name of the activity that was inactive. 

 Our story:  During the school year, we offer a mid-week program for our Kinder-5th Grade students.  When the school year ends, we begin working on the next year's program.  Last year, the Activity was simply called "Adventure Club".  When I wanted to set-up Adventure Club for this school year, I simply returned to last year's now-inactive Adventure Club, and changed the name to "Adventure Club 2007-2008".  This year's Activity Name is Adventure Club (I'll add the "2008-2009" after the school year ends...so that "my" F1 Users won't be confused about which Adventure Club is the current one).  Hope this helps!  :)

Oh...and we keep Staffing Assignments, even when they're inactive, and we remove one-time participant assignments for our children (for events that are one-timers:  our membership class childcare, for example).  If the activity is for adults, we usually keep it visible unless the record is just getting too cluttered with various participant assignments/registrations.

 

We Keep all our participant Assignments, It's just easier and it's also a good way for us to see past volunteer or other misc. history. We use attendance also, but in our view it would be far too time consuming to remove each person's participant assignment. 

Jonathan Malinaric

New Life Church, Colorado Springs

A Family Ministry Center 

 

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Jonathan D. Malinaric
Children's Ministry Guest Relations
New Life Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado
A Family Ministry Center

www.newlifechurch.org

Hi Bob,

We are thinking that we'd like to delete the participant assignments. We have a lot of events and it's getting harder to sort through them. I'm curious as to what you are doing at your church?

Thanks,

Debbie Doell, Cornerstone Fellowship 

 

Peter - we have a lot of participant assignments and it's getting harder to sift through them all. You posted this reply in 2006. Are you still thinking that it's better to keep assignments rather than delete them?

Thanks,

Debbie Doell, Cornerstone Fellowship

This could all be fixed if F1 had an option to view Active and Inactive participant & staffing assignments.  It should default to view on active.  This would be tied to the activity.  If the activity for a participant assignemnt was made inactive then the participant assignment would also be inactive.  The staffing assignment could be the same way.  I have requested this through ideas.  Hopefully, it will be implemented.

Debbie,

  From a data standpoint, I tend to find interest in the various assignments, looking at who was assigned, who never showed, who showed up all the times, is there a pattern to people who were assigned and never showed up to anything, how did they get assigned to an event for which they have no attendance, etc.  However, from a management standpoint, I can understand that a lot of historic assignments make the screens feel "noisy".  With that in mind, I think that this has to be evaluated case by case.  You may want to know the people who signed up for certain events so you can target them for future contacts - perhaps just to say that you're sorry you missed them and that a new event is scheduled for a future date.  Other assignments may not hold historic value for you once you have the attendance posted.

As Tara rightly posted above - Attendance is permanent. If that attendance is sufficient for you and you don't need to see historic assignments, then removing them may make the most sense for you in that case. I know this isn't quite the definite answer you were hoping for, but I really think that the answer depends on the needs of the ministry and should have a little consideration for each set of assignments just to make sure that the correct decision is being made.

 

In Him,

-Peter Schott