You can now record attendance for your Church Service(s), Sabbath School and any other regularly occurring meeting such as vespers, prayer meetings etc, right in eAdventist!
UPDATE: Attendance has been added to the Pastor and Church Secretary roles in eAdventist.
Here’s how:
Set up Meetings (Note: “Weekly Church Service” and “Weekly Sabbath School” meetings have already been created for most churches to help get you started)
1. Click the “Attendance” option under the Organizations heading on the menu
2. Click the “Meetings” link to view the list of meetings
3. Click the “Add a meeting” button
4. Select the meeting type (Church Service, Sabbath School, Other). This allows you to enter each church services or Sabbath School class individually, but then summarize them all together as one number for each type in the report to the conference (coming soon!).
5. Enter the meeting description (Divine Worship, Early Service, 11am Service, SS – Earliteen, SS – Cradle Roll, SS – Balcony, Vespers etc)
6. Select the organization, for most users this will be your church
7. Click “Save”
When finished setting up each of the meetings you wish to track, click “Attendance” at the top of the Meetings page or in the menu on the left to go back to the Attendance page.
Record Attendance
1. Click the “Add attendance” button
2. Select the meeting you are recording attendance for
3. Enter the date the meeting occurred on
4. Enter the head count for the meeting
5. OPTIONAL: Enter the internet count for the meeting (those watching the sermon online etc)
6. Click “Save”
Attendance Report
First, notice that the quarter and year have automatically been assigned to each attendance entry based on the date of the meeting. It has also suggested that we add the Sabbath number for each attendance entry, which is something we’ll look into doing.
To view your attendance on a graph click the “Attendance Report” link on the Attendance screen.
Select the meetings you wish to appear on the graph, enter the start and stop dates (if desired) and click “Show” to view the graph. In this scenario we’re comparing the Early Service with the Late Service for June. Looks like more people are getting up early!
Our hope is that this will be a useful tool for the local church and not just an easier way of reporting to the conference. We’ve had several pastors tell us, “Who wouldn’t want to know what’s happening in their church every week?” The goal of this attendance feature is to make it easy it easy for the church to track these numbers and view them in a meaningful way on a graph.
God bless,
eAdventist Team
Super Cool!! Thank you, Susan Paris, TX SDA Clerk
I love graphs. I have been keeping the attendance on G-drive then emailing in to our conference. This is easier with the bonus of the graphs. Thank you, Susan from Paris, Texas.
I was amazed how the numbers started to come alive when I put them on a graph for this feature. Glad you like them as well!
who can access this option?? Can pastors or just online clerks??
Right now it is just clerks, but we can open it up if that is the desire. We may add a separate role so all pastors don’t get it automatically?
So easy! Thank you for making this available…and with a brand new pastor, it’s extremely helpful for him to see our past trends.
Who has the access to enter the attendance numbers? Clerk? Secretary? Pastor? I have some pastors who want to be able to enter the numbers themselves, others want the church secretary to do so.
Right now we started with the conference and church clerks. Let us know your needs. Should we add it for all pastors and church secretaries or make it a separate role so only certain ones are given this feature?
I don’t see any harm in adding it to pastors and church sec.
Under Meeting Attendance Report, it’s confusing to see the multiple, for example Sabbath School, kindergarten etc..! Or am I still not getting it? 🙂
Thank you.
Sarah, several have requested we add attendance for pastors and church secretaries, so this change has been made.
The conference sees every church’s attendance and meetings, so the list will get a bit long and redundant. We’ll work on a better conference dashboard.
I think it is an excellent tool for evangelism and for pastors to access this feature separately, but I do not think that bulletin secretaries should have access because there is private information in eadventist and the clerk should be the only one to have access to this information. It might as well be open up to the whole church! Is it mandatory to take attendance at each service, whatever the case may be? I think that sometimes as SDA Christians, we get a little naïve and without thinking or praying about a situation, we just yell “GO AHEAD” setting ourselves up for the worst!
Diane, thanks for your response. Rest assured that each user in eAdventist only has access to the areas in the program that pertain to them. If/when we allow bulletin secretaries or deacons etc to edit attendance, they would NOT be given full run of the program.
As for recording attendance for each service, please contact your conference office. The requirements vary between conferences and unions around the NAD.
If it is opened up to pastors and secretary ( unless secretary is also the clerk) you may have multiple entries. I do think the report should be accessible to pastors if they want to check.
Ideally the pastor and clerk would coordinate if they are both entering attendance, or at least look at what has been entered, but we understand that isn’t that always the case. To prevent duplicates the program will pop up a warning if an attendance is recorded for the same meeting on the same date as another one that is already entered. Thanks for your feedback.
Rob Garvin
eAdventist Team
Thank you very much, Rob and eAdventist team, for all your great work and ministry; it’s truly appreciated.
Sarah
Ontario Conference
I am currently using eadventist to log attendance. I like it very much and have a few suggestions.
Suggestion 1 – add a free flow comment column to help explain spike and lows. Eg. Community guest day, snow storm, etc.
Suggestion 2 – add column to indicating Sabbbath for the month (first, second, …. fifth). I think it would help to better see patterns.
Please open it up to pastors.
Thanks
When is this going to be functional Rob? Will it be a weekly or monthly recording?
Sizie, yes this feature is functional now. It is designed for you to record your church and Sabbath school numbers weekly if you wish. We are with with NAD administration for official guidelines. The GC has requested 2nd and 7th Sabbath. I know some conferences and unions do more than that. -Rob
Thank you Rob and the whole eAdventist team for constantly making eAdventist a great website. Just wanted to make sure that if I church clerks enter their information in the Attendance page, the Conference Clerks AND Union will be able to retrieve this information from eAdventist and download it in excel?
Claudya
Potomac Conference
Claudya, yes the conference will be able to generate a report of all churches in the conference (coming soon). As well as have a dashboard to see which churches have reported etc. A download would be possible as part of that. We will keep you updated. -Rob
Wish I could print out these instructions. Thanks.
Anita, you can. Just use your browser’s Print function. “Ctrl+P” is a short cut for it in Windows.
Thanks ! I’m just getting started but this makes everything so easy to understand and is so useful.
~Kenia
Excellent, glad to hear that.
Thank you for trying to make our jobs easier. I am in a Conference that splits the duties between two people. One of us is Conference clerk and one of us takes care of attendance. How does the non-Conference clerk person get access to take care of attendance? Also, some of our churches want to keep the guest count different from the membership count – is there a way to do that as well?
Carol of Minnesota Conference
Thanks for your feedback, Carol. Pastors, church secretaries and conference clerks currently have access to attendance. Does this other person have an eAdventist account, or is attendance all that they do? If needed we can add just an “Attendance” role. For Guests, I might suggest creating a “Church Service – Guests” meeting alongside the regular “Church Service” meeting except set the meeting type to “Other” so it’s not added in with the first church service. This way you could see the “official” attendance of 100, which would be reported to the conference, and then the Guest count of 20. We realize we’ve opened a big can of worms with attendance, so we got the ball rolling and are open to recommendations and feedback to help it grow. -Rob
How would a conference clerk enter in all of the Companies attendance and also the Churches that are not doing their own membership on-line?
Yes, the conference can enter attendance on behalf of the churches/companies. First set up the desired church service and Sabbath school meetings for each church/company, and then add the attendance entries for the desired dates.
I would like to know if the pastor can change the information that the secretary put there.
Yes, clerks, pastors and church secretaries with eAdventist accounts all have access to add/edit/delete attendance numbers. The name of the person who added or edited the information will show under “Updated By”, so you can see who made a particular change. -Rob
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Hello eadventist Team,
I appreciate what you all are doing I have started to put in my attendance count each Sabbath. Wish I would have started earlier. However I like to make a suggestion. Is it possible that when we put our total count we can add a “note” in the same box that hides until you click on it so when we click on the total we can be reminded why our total number was so low or extra high? This last Sabbath due to the extreme weather we dropped in attendance in half. So it would be nice to be able to look back and remember what were the reasons for our spikes and dips. Or it may be easier to but an extra box to the far right to add these special notes. We can add if we had a special program or if it was a Christmas weekend or any other factor that could havce affected attendance. Well thanks for listening.
Pastor Sierra
Cartersville
Pastor Sierra,
Thanks for the feedback. A couple of other people have asked for something similar. It poses a few difficulties handling the entry and display on screen and on reports and graphs, but we will add it to our ToDo list. Also, note that you can always go back and enter your historical attendance if you would like to view your reports and graphs for the previous quarter or year of further.
God bless,
Rob Garvin
eAdventist Team