Rock U - Groups - Group Attendance

Transcribed Video Content

So groups are one of the core things in Rock. And as a side note, you may be familiar with Rock's check-in. And check-in is a really great way to see attendance, who's there, how long they were there, things that, but they help you track how people have been engaging. Now it's the same thing with group attendance, but there's no need for something a kiosk. Group attendance is a really easy way to pick a group such as a small group or just some kind of group that meets regularly and let people manually track who is there. Let's look at how to set up group attendance in Rock right now. So before you start tracking group attendance, we need to make sure it's on for the group type. The way we do that is by going to admin tools up to settings, and we're gonna look for group types. Click on that and then look for the group type that you're dealing with. In this case, we're using small groups, which comes out of the box. And once you're here, you can go down to attendance. And you wanna make sure that enable attendance tracking is on. That's very crucial if you wanna track attendance. Otherwise, all the groups under this group type won't have attendance available. Now there's a couple different settings. You can pick the kind of schedule that you want. You can either create a custom one or you can have a weekly one or a named one, and this will mean as the group is picking how they do attendance, what group schedule types are available. And for small groups, we're just assuming that a weekly schedule is the only one that they'll be able to pick from or that we want them to be able to pick from. Now you can also do a schedule exclusion. So say we know that every summer our groups are off, then it's really easy to come here and pick a series of dates that we don't want occurrences to happen on. That makes it easy for everyone that tracks attendance. Then you can also pick whether you want attendance for this group type to actually count towards weekend service attendance. That'll probably be rarely clicked unless there's something that's supplemental to your weekend attendance that you track using group attendance. Or you can pick whether when attendance is tracked, a location is required or a schedule is required. But we don't need to do any of those for that. You can also pick to have automatic reminders to encourage attendance or follow-up communication after events. And this is nice if you think that every group that's under this group type, the people that are expected to attend that are part of those groups should get reminders when an event is coming soon or an occurrence is coming soon. So we'll just save that. And now we're gonna head to the group viewer. So we'll go to people, then click on group viewer, and I'm going to go to the Marble group. Now before we mess with attendance, I'm gonna show you some things we can edit on the group. So I've clicked edit, and I'm going to scroll to these meeting and scheduling details. So, basically, the only group schedule we allowed for this group type is weekly. And we said that it's not required, so you can click none if you want. But Alicia Marble's group meets every week on a Tuesday at this time, meaning that we'll have an occurrence automatically created as long as there isn't a schedule exclusion. We've also picked a location, though you don't have to do that. We can also do some different things here disabling group member scheduling, hide from the schedule toolbox, and I'll show you our our group toolbox soon, or require member requirements for scheduling. But this isn't really relevant because it has to do with group scheduling rather than attendance. But we'll click save here with what we have, and we're gonna click on the attendance section under participation. You'll immediately see we've actually already been tracking attendance for this group and it's easy to sort through all the different attendance occurrences and search and more. But we can see the number of people that attended, the attendance rates, all that. And we actually had a recent occurrence show up with no attendance tracked. So let's say we wanna change that. And again, this is the internal view. So if you're having group leaders enter their own attendance, it'll look a little bit different than this. But we're gonna click on this instance, and we got a good amount of detail here and it's super easy to track attendance. So first of all, you can say if the group straight up didn't meet for some reason. You can easily add a note. We could say something , due to weather events, many missed this meeting. You can even download the roster if you track attendance manually or you wanna have a printout of the people that are in your group, then we can actually just start tracking people's attendance by clicking on their names. It's that easy. And you can see their status in the group such as whether they're a leader or a member, and we've got all the stuff we need. So we are gonna head back. And there you go. We already have that attendance tracked really nice, really easy. If you wanted to add a new occurrence that didn't happen or or didn't happen automatically because of your schedule, all you have to do is click that plus button, and you can add an attendance for any date, custom, and then you can pick who is there. But something else that's important about attendance is reminders. So you already saw how you can send out reminders to attendees, but you can actually also send out reminders to leaders. So if you go to admin tools, then to settings, and then type in job or jobs, find jobs administration. Jobs are simply these things that run-in Rock on a reoccurring basis. You can pick what that schedule is. A lot of these happen out of the box, But if you come here, type in attendance, just scroll a little bit, you'll see these two jobs. Here we have a send attendance reminders for group type. We also have sends group attendance reminders. And let's say that we have a group that we want to send out reminders to leaders for so that they remember to track attendance. You would create a job or use one out of the box and you would come to the job type. You would pick sends group attendance reminders and it's that simple. You pick you pick how often this job runs and what you use to send the actual message. So that's a really nice way to send out reminders to leaders. You can also send a group attendance digest. You can do both of those if you'd , but the group attendance digest is a little bit different. I'll show you what it looks . If we go to admin tools, then settings, and we look up system communications, and then type in attendance, we can see if we'd either the group attendance digest or reminder, and you can actually edit these. But we'll click on one. There's all sorts of info. Then you can see the actual view of what this looks . So this is actually using some lava and more, in this case, the group attendance digest to tell you the small group names, meeting date, attendance, and notes. And this is really nice for people that need to stay updated on how attendance is going in groups. Then heading back here, we'll look at just the group attendance reminder, and this is pretty simple. It it's just a link that takes you to enter attendance. This is for the leaders, and it's just reminding them, please remember to enter attendance for your group meeting on blank, and that's just using Lava to populate a date. Now let's move on. Right now, I'm on a group leader's profile on the external website. So Alicia Marble is on staff, but she doesn't have to be to access this view. There's a list of groups here, and she can click on this group which takes her to the group toolbox because she's the leader of that group. It says quite a bit about her group here, And all she has to do if she wants to take attendance is click on attendance here, and you can already see the attendance count, lots of different occurrences. And when you click on one, it will show the list of people that are in this special group. She can pick whether they were there or not. So you can do this internally or externally, and it's easy to remind your people and your staff whether they need to take attendance or just give them a brief update on how group attendance is going. Great. Now you have some ways to track attendance manually in Rock for groups. You can use this data in all kinds of things such as reports so that you can see how people have been engaging. Thanks for watching this video on group attendance. Have a great day.