Wouldn’t you love to know each and every one of your regular attenders? Get a reminder every time a new one showed up and another when someone left? Well, without divine intervention, that’s just not possible today. With all the data in Rock, though, we can make a decent prediction of a regular attender. This is what we call eRA (no… not Earned Run Average… Estimated Regular Attender).

Recipe for an eRA

The key data points for calculating an eRA are giving and attendance. Neither is treated as more important, as each is a good reflection of activity. While researching the best algorithm, we tried to have a bias toward the speed of detection without having too many false positives. The result should determine a regular attender within four months of the first activity.

There are actually two recipes for determining an eRA. The first determines how one becomes (enters) an eRA, the other determines how one exits from being an eRA.

Criteria for Becoming an eRA

• Have given at least four times in 12 months, once being in the last six weeks
• (or) have attended at least eight times in the last 16 weeks

Keep in mind that every giving transaction counts toward eRA. So, if a person gave twice last Sunday and twice this Sunday, that counts as four transactions and the person will become an eRA.

Criteria for Exiting an eRA:

• Haven't given in over eight weeks
• (and) have attended less than eight times in the last 16 weeks
• (and) haven't attended at all in the last four weeks

You might be thinking, "Those are a great start, a little tweaking for our organization and we'll be set." Another goal of the eRA metric is to have a well-defined measure that churches can use to help benchmark. Because of this, we don't allow the recipe to be configured.

If you're not sure why standard benchmarks are needed, let’s use an example. If you ask a church what their attendance is, the need for standard benchmarks becomes clear. Without asking at least four qualifying questions (is that just weekend services, does it include volunteers, etc.) you won't know what this number really represents. For that reason, and to establish that well-defined measure, when calculating eRA Rock looks at the attendance for groups whose attendance counts as 'Weekend Service'.

Viewing the Analytics

Person Profile Page

Most of the information will be viewed on the person's Profile Page, specifically the Extended Attributes tab. Let's take a look.

eRA Badge

The state of the person's eRA can also be seen on the badge bar. The eRA badge has three states.

• Is eRA: The person currently is an eRA
• Was Recently eRA: Was an eRA but exited the eRA criteria in the last 30 days.
• Is Not eRA: Does not meet the eRA criteria. This badge is simply blank.

eRA History

It's possible that a family can start and stop being an eRA multiple times. To help you see this type of activity we log each time a person enters and exits the eRA status on their history (Person Profile > History Tab).

eRA Workflows

Would it concern you if someone who has had regular activity in the past suddenly becomes irregular? Of course it would! You’d probably want to be notified or send them a communication, right? Well, we’ve thought of that for you. The Family Analytics job can be configured to launch a new workflow (you’ll still need to create the workflow) anytime a family enters or exits from being an eRA. To help simplify your workflow, the job will pass in the following information:

A couple of things to think about as you configure your workflow:

• If the family doesn't have any adults configured, no workflow will be launched.
• Remember the "e" in eRA stands for Estimated. It's not perfect. If you have a communication as a part of your workflow, be sure not to make any assumptions. It's possible that they are still attending but are not giving or having kids check in. Try to make the tone of your communications more of a "Just checking in…" instead of "We miss you…"

See our Blasting Off With Workflows guide for more information on workflows.