Youth ministry runs on relationships, and relationships run on showing up and staying in touch. Youth Ministry treats attendance and contact as two sides of the same coin: the app records who was present at each event, and surfaces the people you should probably reach out to based on who’s gone quiet.
Attendance vs. registration — two different things
Many tools conflate “who signed up” with “who actually came.” Youth Ministry keeps them separate on purpose:
- Registration is stored on the event as an Event Participant. It tracks who committed, whether they paid, whether forms are in, and any medical notes. One participant record per person per event.
- Attendance is stored as an Attendance Record. It records that a person was physically present on a given date. Multi-day events can have multiple attendance records per person — one per day you check in.
This matters for two reasons. First, your weekly meetings, classes, and drop-in events have attendance but no registration — you want to track who showed up without inventing a sign-up list. Second, for a retreat, you probably care both about who paid and who actually made it on the bus. The separation keeps both answers clean.
Taking attendance
From any event, open the Attendance component (or tap Take Attendance on a simple event). You’ll see a check-in view with your roster on one side and the current session on the other. Tap each person as they arrive. You can:
- Filter the list to students, leaders, or a specific group to speed things up
- Add a guest on the fly if someone new walks in — the guest is added to the roster immediately as a person of type Guest
- Take attendance across multiple sessions for multi-day events (day 1, day 2, morning session, evening session, etc.)
Only people you mark present get an attendance record. The app doesn’t store “absent” entries — silence means absence, which keeps the data clean and makes “last seen” calculations straightforward.
The Contact Log
Everything else — the text you sent a student, the call you had with a parent, the coffee you grabbed after school — goes in the Contact Log. From a person’s profile, tap Log Contact and fill in the date, method (text, phone, email, in-person, social media, other), and any notes you want to remember.
Contact logs power the “Students to Contact” section of the Dashboard. A student who was contacted two days ago drops off the suggestion list; a student nobody has talked to in three weeks surfaces near the top.
The Contact Management view
The Contact Management view (accessed from the Roster tab) is a dedicated workspace for outreach. It’s organized into sections:
- Birthdays This Week — everyone whose birthday falls in the next seven days
- Needs Follow-Up — students flagged for follow-up or who’ve gone quiet
- New Guests — recent guests you haven’t contacted yet
- Recently Contacted — a record of who you’ve been reaching out to
You can filter all of these by engagement level, grade, school, gender, or group, and each row offers one-tap shortcuts to text, call, or email.
Attendance reports
The Attendance Report feature (launched from Contact Management) answers questions like: “Which Core-level 10th graders haven’t been to a Wednesday meeting in the last month?” You pick engagement tiers, event types, and a time window, and the app returns the list. Use it when you’re planning a push to re-engage a specific slice of students, or as a regular check-in on the health of your community.
The rhythm
The whole attendance + contact system is designed to run on a weekly rhythm:
- Take attendance at each event. It’s quick — a minute or two at the door.
- Check the Dashboard each morning and reach out to the one or two students it surfaces.
- Log each conversation so the list stays accurate.
- Once a month, run an Attendance Report on the engagement tiers that matter most and catch anyone the Dashboard missed.
You don’t need to keep the app open to do ministry. You need a tool that notices the drift between Sundays so you can go do the ministry.
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