Help & Support Demographics How does Demographic Progression work?
How does Demographic Progression work?
Every church has a sequence in which people move through your church. This is the same for children in children's ministry all the way to the more senior aged people. It can be a huge task to keep people up-to-date in their correct demographic especially when it comes to children as they are changing regularly. To overcome this problem we have developed a system called Demographic Progression.
Demographic Progression allows you to set-up a system to move any person within a demographic into another demographic automatically based on either their age or grade. You can also set-up development based demographics which we'll explain more below. You can use a mixture of age based, grade based and development based simultaneously throughout all your demographics depending on the requirements of each demographic.
Demographic Progression is mainly used for demographics that include children but can be used to move people of any age into the demographics they fit in if you'd like it to happen automatically.
Development Based Demographics
Generally used for children, children within these demographics generally need to reach a goal before moving onto the next demographic. For example the goal might be to go from crawling to walking. As a result these children will need an admin or volunteer to change their demographic manually when they move onto the next stage.
Age Based Demographics
When a person has their birthday it will automatically move them into the next demographic that they fit into. You can also set this to be based on how many months old a child is. So if a child was born on the 23rd April, then on the 23rd May they will be considered 1 month old. On the 23rd June they will be 2 months old and so on. You can set-up demographics to accept children aged between certain months.
Grade Based Demographics
When a child moves to the next grade at school, they can automatically be moved onto the next demographic they fit into. Under Account Settings -> People settings under the School Grades heading you can manage what school grades you wish to include and also choose what day of the year to update children to the next grade. By default it will update all children on the 1st January.
Special Needs Children
You can add to your People Category layouts a field called 'Special Needs Child'. This is for children who are developmentally-challenged and do not fit to usual progression you have set-up. For example this child might need to stay in the 3 year old room even though they are too old. Ticking this check box when you edit the child's details will result in an admin or volunteer having to change the child's demographic manually when they move onto the next stage.
