Overview
GoDoChurch gives you the ability to track attendance for each of your groups. Here is a summary of how it works:
Attendance is managed through the admin system.
To record attendance, a group leader needs to create a session for each time that group meets.
Group leaders or church administrators are able to mark off those who attended.
All done!
Before you begin
Keeping accurate records of group attendance requires quite a bit of administration. We recommend thinking carefully about whether you want to implement this. It is virtually impossible to have a single administrator keep this info up-to-date using the admin system. The only feasible way to implement it is to have your group leaders track attendance and log it in the admin system. Even when you go this route, in our experience, it takes a lot of work to build and maintain a culture where group leaders are faithful to update this info.
The primary purpose of keeping records of group attendance is to provide church leaders with a sense of the health of the church's groups. Our recommendation is to try to solve this problem by coming at it from another angle: having your leaders fill in a simple survey every few months asking them to rate attendance at their group on a scale of 1 - 10 can accomplish the same goal as tracking attendance using the app, and it takes far less work.
Another reason why tracking group attendance might not be worth the effort is that GoDoChurch does not currently have a reporting feature for group attendance. We can capture the information but currently are not able to turn that information into a useful report. We will add this feature sometime in the future though, so captured data would not be wasted.
If you are convinced tracking attendance is critical, then keep reading.
Track group attendance using the admin system
To track attendance you need to create a session for each time the group meets. Here is how to do this in the admin system:
Create a session
Open the Groups module from the main menu.
Search for the group for which you want to create a session.
Next to the group's name you'll see a set of buttons. Click Action >> View Sessions. This will bring up a list of all the sessions for this group.
To create a new session click New Session.
Fill in the name of the session, date, and info about the session and then click Update.
Manage attendance
Look for the session you want to update in the list of sessions for that group.
Click Attendance.
To mark someone as having attended press the red Attended button. When you press it the button will change to a green button. This means they are now marked as having attended.
If you wish to change a person's status from attended to absent, click the Green button Has Not Attended. The button will now change to a red button, which means they are marked as absent.
Attendance reports
At the moment we do not have a reporting feature for group attendance.
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