Purpose

Our church recently launched "Watch Parties", where we encourage our attendees to meet small before we meet big. We needed a way for people to 1) sign up to be a host of a watch party, 2) easily take attendance for just the number of adults/kids present (not tracking individuals), and 3) easily pull the attendance data for leadership. 

We accomplished this using multiple workflows and metrics...and here's how!

Prerequisites

1. Create a new group type called "Watch Party" with the following options set:

• General
  • Allow Specific Group Member Workflows: checked
  • Enable Group History: checked
• Attendance/Check-in
  • Takes Attendance: Yes
  • Send Attendance Reminder: Yes
  • Group Schedule Options: Named
• Roles
  • Host (delete all other roles):
    • Is Leader: checked
    • Can View: checked
    • Default: checked
• Group Attributes
  1. Name: Does this watch party include the kids' services?
     • Field Type: Boolean
     • Key: IncludeKids
  2. Name: Preferred Service?
     • Field Type: Single-Select
     • Key: PreferredService
     • Values (change these to reflect your own service times): SA5^Saturday 5:00pm,SU815^Sunday 8:15am,SU945^Sunday 9:45am,SU1130^Sunday 11:30am,OT^Other
• Group Member Workflows
  • [COVID-19] Watch Party Host Welcome (attached below for import)

2. Create a new group type called "Watch Party Section" with the following options set:

• General
  • Allowed Child Group Types: Watch Party

3. Create a new top-level group called "Watch Parties" as a group type of Watch Party Section

4. Create a new "Watch Party" schedule

• The only purpose for this schedule is so that the "send attendance reminder" job will kick off for the watch party groups, so make it the first day of your services (i.e. we meet Saturday and Sunday, the schedule starts Saturday)

Setup

Signing up to host a watch party

This is all driven from a single workflow. Here's how to set that up!

1. Add a new System Communication that will be used as the Welcome email for new hosts

• The code for our system communication is attached. It isn't meant to be copy/pasted and done, as it heavily references our organization, but you can use it as a guide to change for your own organization.

2. Import the workflow Host a Watch Party (attached below)

• Change the first four attributes to the appropriate entities in your system:

3. In the previously imported [COVID-19] Watch Party Host Welcome workflow, change the System Communication used in the Send email to the Host action to the one you created in step 1

Taking attendance of the watch party

1. Create two new metrics

• Watch Party Attendance - Adults
  • Series Partitions
    • Campus
    • Schedule
    • Group
      • Entity Type Qualifier Column: GroupTypeId
      • Entity Type Qualifier Value: Id of the Watch Party group type
  • Source Type: Manual
• Watch Party Attendance - Kids
  • Series Partitions
    • Campus
    • Schedule
    • Group
      • Entity Type Qualifier Column: GroupTypeId
      • Entity Type Qualifier Value: Id of the Watch Party group type
  • Source Type: Manual

2. Import the attached workflow Enter Watch Party Attendance

• Change the first three attributes, the first two to the metrics you created in step 1, and the third to update the category ID of the category that holds your service time
• 
• 
  

• In the Process Attendance Data Activity, you'll need to change 6 different values between 2 actions
  • In the Insert Adult Attendance action, change the last 3 SET statements (the partition IDs) to the partition IDs that result from this SQL statement:

SELECT m.Title,mp.Id,mp.Label
  FROM Metric m
 JOIN MetricPartition mp ON (mp.MetricId = m.Id)
 WHERE m.Title LIKE '%Watch Party%Adult%'
 ORDER BY m.Title, mp.Label

• • In the Insert Kids Attendance action, change the last 3 SET statements (the partition IDs) to the partition IDs that result from this SQL statement:

SELECT m.Title,mp.Id,mp.Label
  FROM Metric m
 JOIN MetricPartition mp ON (mp.MetricId = m.Id)
 WHERE m.Title LIKE '%Watch Party%Kid%'
 ORDER BY m.Title, mp.Label

3. Create a system communication, Watch Party Attendance, that will be sent to leaders for them to submit. Just be sure to change the workflow entry ID in the link so that it directs to the ID of the newly imported Enter Watch Party Attendance workflow

• The code for our communication is attached, it can be copy/pasted and done, you just need to update the workflow ID in the attendance link and the header.

4. Create a new job, Send Watch Party Attendance Reminders, that will be how hosts receive the attendance email every week

Pulling attendance data for leadership

We haven't done a ton with the data we have other than referencing the metrics themselves, but since the data is stored via metrics, it'll be very easy to turn the data into a dashboard or whatever serves your church best!