Recording Sacrament meeting

[garystroble]

This was posted on LCR main page for me as a Ward Clerk today, unfortunately not sure how we are supposed to count virtual people over 5 weeks ago in arrears? This should have been communicated 6 weeks ago.
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Recording sacrament meeting attendance

Due to COVID-19, sacrament meetings are conducted in a variety of ways throughout the world depending on local guidelines and restrictions. Attendance information is a helpful indicator for Church leaders to understand how members are being blessed. Beginning in October 2020, we ask that local unit leaders and clerks, where practical and possible, record the number of members who participate in sacrament meeting in person or on a broadcast.

[jdlessley]

The part that stands out for situations such as yours are the words "where practical and possible". I would not worry about what has happened in the past but rather focus on going forward.

[garystroble]

You're right, but since we cannot tell how many people are viewing on line as all family members cannot be seen, it will be just an estimate anyway. And some people log in with no name or video so we don't even know who they are. Plus lately we cannot see those logged in at all from home. The burden will be on whoever sets up the broadcast to get or guess a number and get it to the clerk in our ward.

[BrianEdwards]

I see the same info on LCR today, along with the previous info about the Quarterly Reports still being generated from 2019 data. I imagine the usefulness of this data will depend on the existing interest of local leaders in tracking detailed member participation in whatever their sacrament meetings look like: "Attendance information is a helpful indicator for Church leaders to understand how members are being blessed". If leaders feel they understand well enough without detailed attendance numbers, a guesstimate seems appropriate to me.

[ckmcdonald]

I just ran into this problem with our Stake Conference of last weekend. We had a small in-person group and a large remainder that joined virtually. The Stake President is asking me for an estimate of attendance. Our Stake Technology specialist counted 551 connections from members homes. Assuming one connection per household (not a good assumption but I don't have a better one) I figured multiplying that by the average number of members per household would give me a reasonable number. However, it gave me a number 25% points higher than our last two pre-Covid Stake Conferences. I'm having a hard time believing that. Now I'm at a loss at even estimating something I believe is close. Ideas?

[russellhltn]

Our Stake Technology specialist counted 551 connections from members homes.

Which number did he use? During the conference, you'll see two numbers - one is the number of active connections right at that moment, and the larger number will be the number of connections total - including ones that have disconnected.

If someone gets disconnected and reconnects, that will count as two in the total.

[davesudweeks]

I just ran into this problem with our Stake Conference of last weekend. We had a small in-person group and a large remainder that joined virtually. The Stake President is asking me for an estimate of attendance. Our Stake Technology specialist counted 551 connections from members homes. Assuming one connection per household (not a good assumption but I don't have a better one) I figured multiplying that by the average number of members per household would give me a reasonable number. However, it gave me a number 25% points higher than our last two pre-Covid Stake Conferences. I'm having a hard time believing that. Now I'm at a loss at even estimating something I believe is close. Ideas?

I would probably give the number present in person and the number of home connections and let him draw his own conclusions as to how many watched per connection. We don't know what we don't know and if we try to guess at what we don't know it will most certainly be wrong...

[waynecooke]

What we do in our Ward is that when someone signs on, in addition to their name they add the number of people watching at home, for example Cooke-2, Jones-5, etc. Seems to work for us. The ExSec sent out an email to all the Ward members with the request that they add this little bit of info to their sign-ins.