Maintaining your Groups can be automated in a number of ways. One easy way is to use the Attendance you are already taking through Manual Input or Electronic Check-In. Modify this to fit your church setup as needed.

Find the left navigation menu and select Workflows.

Give the newly added Workflow a name that makes it easily recognizable. Also, add a description so it is understood what the purpose of the Workflow is. This helps bring clarity when reviewing at a later point and focus on the goal of the workflow while building it.

Now, add triggers to start building the actions of your Workflow. Since we are working with attendance and group membership, the triggers are going to be a combination of Group and Attendance focus.

The first place to start is by looking for anyone in a particular group(s) and making that true before the workflow proceeds further. The idea is that you are looking for anyone classified as a member or has regular interaction with the organization based on a group and validating it. The group name can vary based on your setup but in our test instance, this is the group Status - Regular Attender. We want the workflow to look at that group through the Group - Add/Remove trigger and verify the person is there first. We do the verification by using the Update Progress action.

Once the validation of a record being in this group is finished, we can now trigger further actions to automatically look for particular criteria. Then, the workflow can take automated actions to maintain the record(s). Let's set that up!

Look for and select the Attendance trigger to act on that criteria. You are setting a number of data points that need to match exactly for the workflow to fire on the actions set up next. Here are some suggested settings that can be tweaked to your liking.

1. Look for a member that is Unexcused (or in other words having no attendance).
2. How many times have they been marked that status? In our example, we are marking them 26 times as based on the settings that follow.
3. Now we set the time range to review. Our example is looking at the last 26 weeks to filter the attendance data.
4. Finally, we set our Group which completes the filtering to see if anyone was missing 26 times over the last 26 weeks based on our digital weekly attendance taken against the group -STATUS - Friend of the Church.

The base action criteria have now been established and we can move on to add actions for what should take place once the criteria have been met. In our example, we do the following 4 things:

1. Add the person to a new group that notes the person as no longer attending and could result in them being removed from the database to clean up their record. Our example has a group used for this purpose to have a list of people that are no longer attending.
2. Remove the person from another group (s). It is important to do the add action before this remove action. That detail ensures your member record is in a group before being removed from others. This is the maintenance part that can automate your processes! In one action the person can be removed from as many groups as needed which relates to their status with the church.
3. From here, there are a number of things that can be done to potentially have a task to follow up, send an email/text, etc. We are just going to create an admin message for this scenario. The message will note that the member was moved to this particular group and to review their record.
4. Use the 'Update Progress' action to complete the trigger and mark the actions as being completed so they do not run again.

The last important item to add for this simple workflow is the 'Update Progress' action. This action makes sure that after the other actions have completed, the database will not run this workflow again for this person. It declares, "I have already run this and don't need to again."

All our triggers, actions, and customization have been added so we need to save our work. Use the DONE button to save your Workflow!

Your new Workflow is now set up and ready use. Click the SAVE button to add the Workflow to the list.

Updated January 11, 2023 16:17