First Pass at Attendance Tracking
Something I’ve been planning for a long time is the ability to track attendance for events. Just basic head counts collected over time. Every Sunday at church I see a volunteer in the back, pen in hand, counting each person and writing the tally down. Perhaps it gets put into a spreadsheet, perhaps just written down in a book. Either way it’s nice information to have and I thought Stafftool would be a great place to keep track of it all, however, it wasn’t something that made it into the initial launch. Recently, though, some of the great users in the support forums were asking about and discussing Event Attendance Tracking and it got me excited about it getting it going now that it looked like it was indeed something that people needed. So, I’m happy to announce a first pass “preview” of attendance tracking.
So, while there were some great ideas brought up in the thread that I have plans to discuss and explore further, I really wanted to get some simple functionality out there right away so you all could start kicking the tires. Essentially, you can now set any event to track attendance. This makes most sense on repeating events, such as Sunday service, as you’ll soon see, but you can also record attendance on a single event if you’d like as well. To do so, just check the new box in the event form and update.
This will enable attendance tracking for that event, which you can see in the new tab that appears in its info card.
No, the first time you click on that tab for an event, you’ll be greeted with an empty chart and attendance table, along with a little quick entry form at the bottom.
Your cursor will already be focused on the number entry field, and today’s date will already be selected. So, if you’re recording your service’s attendance right after service, all you’ll have to do is type in the number and hit return and it’ll be added. You’ll notice that the chart right below the tabs will update. It won’t look like much the first time, but over time you’ll start to see some trends. For now, it will max out at showing you the attendance trend for the most recent 10 dates you’ve entered. Here’s a sample of an event that has 10 attendance tally entries:
As you can see the chart is very simple and just meant to show you the general trends over time. The top of the chart is denoted with the highest count during that time period to give you some context.
That’s pretty much it at this point…really basic, but really useful to start keeping track in one place and get a quick overview of how things are going. I have more plans for improving what’s there now, and like I said, the discussion on the forums has a lot of great things to consider for future enhancements…but let me know what you think so far!
1 year ago