How to take attendance like a pro
The simple act of taking attendance doesn't get enough attention. You’d think it should be easy, but it’s not as simple as it first appears. Having solid, accurate attendance processes are hugely beneficial to your choir for a number of reasons, but, unfortunately, this important piece of choir administration often seems to fall through the cracks. Don’t worry, the *Choir Geniuses* have you covered. Learn how to up your attendance game with this easy how-to guide.
Why take attendance?
Attendance is an important part of every choir’s day-to-day management. Whether you engage in a strict minimum attendance policy, or have a more relaxed policy in place, there are so many reasons to take attendance - and to make sure you’re doing it right!
Encourages engagement & accountability
When people know that their attendance (or lack thereof) is being documented, it creates accountability and incentivizes higher levels of engagement.
Creates loyalty
Loyalty is a crucial part of your choir community. Attendance tracking shows your members that you care, that their absence is felt and their presence is valued.
Provides valuable information for member retention
Documenting who shows up when, gives you valuable information about which members are your most active, and what member relationships you might consider ‘at risk’. Having a staff member or volunteer responsible for following up with absent members after a period of time, can increase your retention rates and keep members coming back season after season.
Limits access to rehearsals (members only)
Might seem relatively simple, but you want to make sure that your rehearsals are only being attended by your registered choir members.
Covid Compliance
Depending on where you’re located, and what health guidelines and restrictions exist in your area, taking attendance can meet the requirements of contact tracing and tracking vaccine status.
The 4 steps to taking attendance
How much actually goes into taking attendance? What are the steps involved in making it happen effectively?
Step 1: Invitations
The first step to taking accurate attendance is making sure the right people get invited.
For larger choral organizations and children’s choral organizations, the ‘invitations’ phase can be complicated. You might have events running concurrently, or engage several different groups in multiple events (i.e. Junior Choir, Performance Ensemble, Senior Choir). The more people you have to manage, the more complicated your event invitation system becomes. You need to make sure everyone knows which events they’re invited to, and when they’re required to attend.
Many organizations still use a simple calendar application to schedule events, and pair it with a free communications system like google groups, mailchimp or manual mailing lists in order to communicate and invite members to participate. Anyone who has done this knows how quickly it can get complicated - and how much room there is for error!
What if someone ends up on the wrong mailing list, or changes lists, or just misses the email? What if you accidentally forward an invite to the wrong people, or you hit send but there’s an error in the date?
**Hint**
Look an organizational tool that will allow you to schedule events, send invitations and generate reminders all in one. Even better, one that will keep your invitation lists up to date as people come and go, and allow for invitees to RSVP to upcoming scheduled events. Sound too good to be true? Watch this video on how Choir Genius does all this and more.
Step 2: Forecasting
Forecasting is an important part of your attendance management for several reasons. If you need to cancel, reschedule, or move your event, you need to be able to contact everyone who was predicted to attend. Forecasting also allows you to send reminders of policies where applicable (hopefully before violations occur), and helps you get a sense of whether there is interest and enthusiasm for your event before it happens.
In the current climate, where so much of what we do is online, or a combination of online and in-person, having the ability to forecast virtual vs. physical attendance is incredibly useful.
For example: You are limiting in-person attendance to 20 members per week, with the rest of ‘zooming’ in from home. You have members forecast their availability to attend in-person, and then create the weekly roster of singers based on that information. Even if a singer calls in sick on the day, you have advanced information about who is available and can make last minute changes as necessary - all thanks to forecasting! You can have members indicate if they’d prefer to continue attending online, or if they are available in-person, which also allows you to gauge the comfort levels of choir members.
Step 3: Taking attendance
Ok, so here’s the part you’ve been waiting for - actually taking attendance.
Choosing, or building the right attendance sheet is key. How do you organize your singers, and what is the easiest way for your attendance takers to find them? Whether your attendance is printed, digital, done manually or with a scanner is up to you, providing it’s fast, accurate and relatively easy to use.
Who should take attendance?
Choir Director: While the director likely knows most if not all of the members in the choir, the time and energy spent taking attendance could be better used elsewhere.
Staff members: In some groups, there is a dedicated staff member who checks in members as they arrive. If you are a volunteer led organization, or have limited staffing resources, this is likely not a good option.
Volunteers. May or may not know and recognize everyone, it’s essential you either have someone to double check and approve the sheet, or that your system has fail safes built-in (i.e Choir members wear name tags)
Membership Committee. Some groups might have a volunteer “membership committee”, with attendance being one of their responsibilities. This committee should be a primary point of contact when onboarding new members, so that they are able to recognize everyone.
Section Leaders: Great option, as they likely know all the people in their section and can easily recognize who is or isn’t there.
Other options?
Have people check themselves in. High risk / low reward. While initially appealing as it requires very little administrative labor, it feels very impersonal, like clocking in at work, and creates a lot of room for inaccuracies.
NOTES ON USING VOLUNTEERS
Using volunteers, you have to introduce failsafes, or you need the support of a 3rd party platform. Remember that more steps in a process = more opportunities for error.
If your volunteer uses a paper attendance sheet, how accurate/consistent are they? What happens if/when people arrive late? Who translates that paper document to a digital file?
If you use an excel sheet, how do you keep your lists up to date when choir members leave? How do you collate and distribute the relevant information?
Using hybrid online/in person rehearsals, who tracks online attendance?
Step 4: Reporting on attendance
Make sure your attendance records are accurate and up-to-date, and collate your results together in a master database or spreadsheet for reporting. Reviewing these reports should be a standard agenda item in your staff and/or board meetings.
Using this data, you can find the answers to questions like, “What was our overall attendance this past year? by group? by month?”, “Who has been missing lately? Should we follow up? Are they a flight risk?” and even “Who has the best attendance record this season, or this month?”
How has your attendance and overall participation changed over the past year, how has your group evolved over time. The answers to these questions are invaluable, and should influence your decisions around development, member engagement and organizational management.
Doing attendance properly is well worth the effort, but it's more complicated and error prone than people think, and it can be an awful lot of work for a lot of people every week, taking up a good percentage of your work hours and energy.
Choir Genius includes an attendance system that manages everything for you according to best practices, and makes it as simple as possible. Learn more about Choir Genius’s solution to attendance woes.
