Checking Sunday Attendance Reporting

[scgallafent]

Given that Sunday School and RS/PH are held on separate days, I'm not sure as that's an issue.

I'm looking at it as "is the member attending" and both SS and RS/PH are able to answer that question.

If you try to divide them up, then the question becomes who records the 5th Sunday? Plus, it's possible that some wards juggle things around when the normal schedule is disrupted. As such, "hard coding" who can record what days may not be desirable.

(For example, General Conference will be Oct 3rd. Is Oct 10th "first Sunday" or "second Sunday"? Keep in mind, there's 5 Sundays that month. If you hard-code things, the answer has to be logical and binding on every unit.)

russellhltn's analysis is spot on.

This will thoroughly confuse our secretaries when they log in and persons are already marked attending because another organization had marked them as attending on a date. When they think that there was no SS, RS or PH that Sunday and delete the attendance, they will delete it where it is supposed to be as well. Sorry, this is not going to end well.

You are the ward clerk. Your job is to provide training: "The ward clerk coordinates record-keeping instruction for assistant clerks and for quorum and organization secretaries." You have direct influence on how well it is going to end. Time to go to work.

[russellhltn]

russellhltn's analysis is spot on.

[blushing]

I do think garystroble has a valid point about confusion. We've seen that in Calendars and Gospel Living were admins delete things not realizing it affected everyone and not just themselves.

I'm not sure what to suggest. Perhaps 'shading' to suggest which ones they are responsible for, or some kind of message if they start deleting attendance. Perhaps titling the screen so it's clear this is both SS and PH/RS. (If it's not already.)

Yes, it can be mitigated by training, but I suspect that training tends to be the exception more than it is the rule. Any cues in the software is helpful.

[scgallafent]

The problem is that any changes would also create their own side effects. There isn't a perfect solution.

If there is a prompt of "did you really mean to unmark this member," a user legitimately correcting data may eventually give up because they have deal with a prompt every time they unmark a row.

If a stake has general conference on the second weekend in April (because they in Asia/Pacific and watch general conference a week later due to the time difference) and stake conference on the fourth weekend in April, they might decide to hold Sunday School classes on the first Sunday and priesthood, Relief Society, and Young Women classes on the third Sunday. Imposing a restriction based on the standard program means that everyone has to get their information to Sunday School to be recorded because it isn't their "week" to have classes.

[russellhltn]

Right. What I'm suggesting isn't as much locking people into a plan, but providing guidance that they can override when the situation warrants.

What this comes down to is what side-effect is least painful.

[lajackson]

Every week there is a column to record attendance at whatever meeting was held. The only suggestion I have is that it would be helpful to keep the dates at the top of the screen while scrolling.

Sometimes when I am 50 names down the list I wind up column shifting, which is not good.

[garystroble]

That is a great summary about there is a column to record attendance at whatever meeting was held every week. Too bad the two emails talking about the attendance roll-out did not mention this or anything similar. Better documentation or instructions would have made this whole issue much easier to understand and implement out here in volunteer land.

[BrianEdwards]

I do agree with the general discussion here; as is often the case, documentation lags implementation (if it ever comes at all...). So we don't know if the current implementation simply overlooked these aspects, or if they were prioritizing other factors that we haven't identified here.

For example, one advantage of this current setup where all weeks are shown, is that our YW leaders are able to easily see the weekly attendance of their young women, so they can quickly determine if the YW are attending SS even if for some reason they don't attend YW. Similarly, a Bishop is able to see if the Priests attend "second hour classes" every week, or if they are all skipping out on Sunday School weeks!

Again, I'm not saying this is or should be the driving factor, and there would seem to be ways to accommodate the needs addressed in this forum thread.

[jtwhitn]

For quarterly report purposes the line item for young men is "Young men attending priesthood and Sunday School meetings" and the note is "Using Class and Quorum Attendance in LCR or Member tools, record the number of young men who attended at least one priesthood or Sunday School meeting during the last month of the quarter." so for now it looks like it will be ok for QR purposes but not if you are looking for actual attendance data.

[sethd]

Our secretaries were confused by it at first, too. However, I explained to them that they need to enter attendance only for the week that their organization meets and let the other organizations enter data in the other weeks. That seems to be working now.

I do see a benefit from having all of the attendance on one page once we get used to it. This way we can easily see which meetings an individual attended.