I was just reading John's thinking about trends in Pby WNY and across the country and thinking about his interest in tracking attendance at meetings of every sort -- presbytery, council, committee, etc. It seems like we ought to be able to craft some sort of electronic way to track people. Online signing in, swipe cards, text messaging, twitter, something that takes advantage of our ability to instantly communicate and feed into some kind of data sorting mechanism. It would require someoneto look at and interpret the data, but it should not be that hard to collect.
On another note, something I have given a bit of thought to as we think about a report to the presbytery on meeting our mission goals and priorities, is that we need to do another round of listening sessions. Whether people felt listened to or not, the listening sessions have been talked about since they happened and they were a way that we got in the door and heard something from most of the congregations in the presbytery. We could ask questions that were far more open ended with a few that were yes or no and/or multiple choice. We could gather quantitative and qualitative information to then use as a way to mark progress toward goals and priorities.
Cathy
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3 comments:
I am keen on tracking attendance because I think we as an organization are still over-extended, or unfocussed whichever term is less offensive. I believe that people not showing up is not a sign of their lack of committment, but an indication of our institutional intransigence - we refuse to do things differently, to consider something besides "gathering together" as sacralizing behavior.
I'm not crazy about meeting on MLK Day myself, but it was a try at something that looked doable at the time. I am certainly open to other suggestions.
I completely agree that the tracking is a good idea. I just hate doing it with paper nad pencil, especially sonce we have a lot of committees and sub committees that meet away from the nice sign insheets prepared for presbytery meetings. I also have rooms full of sign in sheets in my building at CEM and without a way to get them into electronic format, they are really not useful as a source of information.
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