Participant Tracking

An overview on the data points you can use to track participants: participant type, member status, and participant engagement.

Participant Type

The participant record has several key data points to get a clear picture of a person's participation in your church.

The participant type is the relationship of the participant to the church.

Values are required, and you should set them manually based on how a person participates at your church.
These values do not manage church polity. That falls under member status.
Depending on how you manage these values, they may or may not summarize database activity.
These values help answer the question: How connected is this person to our church?
You should include a small number of clear and self-explanatory values that a church might change. As a best practice, we recommend: Guest (or Visitor or New), Attendee, Church Family (or Member), Other, Non-Attending (or Do Not Contact), and Dropped.
If you change these values, we strongly encourage you to keep this a small list of broad, major, and simple values appropriate for your church culture. Think major buckets that are self-explanatory and don't need interpretation. For example, we don't recommend using "Regular Attendee" because "regular" might mean something different to each staff member.
Note: You may see a *Change Me or *Temp Participant Type option. This is a temporary participant type only meant to indicate that you aren't sure what the best participant type is for that record and you need to fix it soon. You may see this participant type if you migrated information and your previous system did not have enough information to assign a better participant type.

Member Status is a formal categorization for your church family.

These values are optional, and you should manually set them based on the Participant's documented actions and/or Milestones.
These values don't summarize databased activity. That falls under Participant Engagement.
You might use these values for a sub-category for people with a "Church Family" or "Dropped" Participant Type.
These values help answer the questions: Does this person count for official business? If so, how?
You should include the smallest possible list to meet your church's bylaws or denomination's requirements. For example, Member, Associate Member, Watchcare, Pending, Disqualified, Disciplined.

Participant Engagement is the degree to which a Participant engagements with your church.

These values set automatically and update by a nightly routine based on various key summary facts stored in hidden fields on the Participant record.
Do not manually set these values.
These values are a summary of database activity.
These values help answer the question: According to my database, how involved is this person in our church?
There are a small number of fixed values that a church should not change: Observer, Partially Engaged, Fully Engaged, Lapsing, Lapsed.

See Participant Engagement Routine for configuration details and options.

Tip: Want to see this in action? Check out the Participants - Engagement webinar in the MinistrySmart Academy!

For other key data points to consider alongside these, see: