Tech Forum

Hello all, newly-called ward clerk here.

I've been asked to help create a model for the 'return to church' plan that we may put in place in July.

My idea that I'd like to test is to create 4 different reports:

- Household report with anyone who has children 11 years old and younger
- Household report with anyone between the ages of 12 and 18
- Household report of anyone without children or youth who are under age 55 or younger
- Household report with members who are over 56 or older

The last one is easy, figured that one out with the web interface through Reports. The other ones... not sure how to best do those. My goal is to create a way to get total numbers for those 4 groups, thereby splitting attendees into the 'under 100 potential attendee' range to abide by Utah's meeting standards. There will be overlap, but I was planning to export the data to Excel to do some processing separately there...

Which brings up another question, what is the most-efficient way to export web reports to Excel? I see the Save and Edit Report options in the upper right of the web interface...

Anyone else out there trying to build attendance models to split wards into similar groups? My thought with this approach is you basically create a primary-focused mini-ward, a youth-focused mini-ward and then empty nesters under 55 ward. Those over 55 would not be encouraged to attend until we've got better public health data.

aaronrturner wrote:- Household report with anyone who has children 11 years old and younger
- Household report with anyone between the ages of 12 and 18
- Household report of anyone without children or youth who are under age 55 or younger
- Household report with members who are over 56 or older

For the children and youth reports, I would do the following:

• Include members who match at least one of the following: Age is (set the age range)
• Under select columns, add the column for head of house along with any other columns you want

At that point, you'll have a list of individuals you're looking for. You will have multiple entries for each household since the custom reports are based on individuals, but you can boil that down to households.

I don't see a good way to generate the under 55 without children or youth list. There aren't really many options for selecting records based on a household characteristic. That would make a great feedback suggestion.

aaronrturner wrote:Which brings up another question, what is the most-efficient way to export web reports to Excel? I see the Save and Edit Report options in the upper right of the web interface...

There isn't an option to export the data.

aaronrturner wrote:My thought with this approach is you basically create a primary-focused mini-ward, a youth-focused mini-ward and then empty nesters under 55 ward. Those over 55 would not be encouraged to attend until we've got better public health data.

You're going to need to decide what happens with the crossover cases. We have 16 households (about 10%) in our ward that meet your criteria for "primary-focused" and "youth-focused." It turns out there are 91 people in those households, so I guess that group could form its own cohort.

You will also need to address cases where attendance should cross over those boundaries. We have two households that need to attend together. One is a single mother with two children and the other is her parents and adult sister. Mom really needs grandma, grandpa, and the aunt there for sacrament meeting to have value for her, but your design would have them in two different buckets.

There are also going to be cases where households with no children split across the 55/56 age boundary. As I went through my list, I saw a couple of possibilities but didn't look at the ages to see if they are straddling the boundary. Are you going to invite one spouse to sacrament meeting but ask the other one to stay home?

For those wondering how I did my calculations: I pulled up the member list, switched to household view, and scanned down the list. It didn't take long to pick out families with children on both sides of the age boundary and count the total number of members. That is probably the approach I would take with this. A ward council should be able to take 15 to 20 minutes and decide how to group people together while accounting for the corner cases that will exist in most wards.

One last thought: If all of your youth are in one meeting, you're consolidating the Aaronic Priesthood quorums into a single meeting. Spreading those families across multiple meetings provides more opportunity for them to participate in administering the sacrament.

scgallafent wrote:
For those wondering how I did my calculations: I pulled up the member list, switched to household view, and scanned down the list. It didn't take long to pick out families with children on both sides of the age boundary and count the total number of members. That is probably the approach I would take with this. A ward council should be able to take 15 to 20 minutes and decide how to group people together while accounting for the corner cases that will exist in most wards.

One last thought: If all of your youth are in one meeting, you're consolidating the Aaronic Priesthood quorums into a single meeting. Spreading those families across multiple meetings provides more opportunity for them to participate in administering the sacrament.

Thanks for the quick response with all of the details about how you pulled the data.

What's the process for me to make feature requests like you mentioned? I used the feedback link at the bottom of the Create a Report page, but if there's a more efficient way to get them the feature request, please let me know.

On the Excel process, luckily Excel does the HTML table paste without any problem, so that's where I'm going to build a master table to track who falls into multiple categories.

Thanks again for the guidance.

After playing with the data in Excel, I think I've come up with a data-crunch hack.

Paste the reports into a dedicated sheet (Primary with HoH, YM+YW with HoH) and then run a full member report with a HoH column.

Use an IF function like this =IF(ISERROR(VLOOKUP(B2,Primary!D:D,1,FALSE)),"No Minors - Primary","Primary Children in Home") which looks to see if the HoH name is included on any Primary records. Do the same with YM+YW and then sort by the No Minors label. It provides an interesting view. Not perfect, but sort of interesting to help drive it.

Within our ward, there are only 10 families with YM+YW without Primary-aged kids. So... this was not an effective sorting mechanism.

We've got bishopbric meeting tomorrow and we'll talk through some other ideas, including the dreaded 'assignment' method. I was trying to make some mechanism that would avoid that, but we may end up there.

Most wards I have seen are doing a simple alphabetical method. First meeting A-L, second meeting M-Z, for example.

Part of it depends on how the meetings are being structured. In multi-ward meetinghouses, some are letting each ward have a set time and invite different parts of the ward each week. Others are letting one ward have the meetinghouse each week and have as many sacrament meetings as they need.

Either way is tricky if you have 250 folks regularly attending and you can only have 50 per meeting now. The first way it would take five weeks to get everyone in. The second way, if there are three wards in the building they can attend every three weeks and hold five sacrament meetings each.