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Learn what each dashboard data source measures and how Attendance, Finance, People, Forms, and Events filters affect the results shown in your widgets.
Connection Card Pro's dashboard widgets can answer many different questions about your church—but getting a useful answer starts with choosing the right Data Source.
For example, New Records, New Guests, and New First Attendance all measure something different. Likewise, All Attendance and Unique Attendees can produce very different numbers even when looking at the same week.
This guide explains what the available data sources measure and how the filters beneath them change the results.
For step-by-step instructions for creating and arranging widgets, see Using Dashboards and Creating Widgets.
When creating a widget, think of its settings as answering three separate questions:
| Setting | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Data Source | What do I want to measure? |
| Filters | Which records should be included? |
| Date Range | When should those records come from? |
The Display setting then determines how the answer is presented.
For example, you could create a widget with:
Data Source: Attendance > Unique Attendees
Filter By Group: Children's Ministry
Date Range: Last 8 Weeks
Display: Trend Line
That widget answers, “How many different people have attended Children's Ministry each week over the last eight weeks?”
Changing only the group filter could turn the same basic widget into one for a worship service, small group, class, or another ministry.
Choose Attendance when you want to measure recorded attendance or check-ins.
All Attendance counts attendance activity during the selected period.
A person can contribute more than once to this total when multiple attendance records are included. This makes All Attendance useful when you care about the total amount of attendance activity rather than the number of different people represented.
For example, if the same person attends multiple gatherings during the period, those attendance records can each contribute to All Attendance.
Unique Attendees counts each person once within each period being measured, regardless of how many qualifying attendance records that person has.
Use this when the question is:
“How many different people attended?”
rather than:
“How many total attendance records were recorded?”
This distinction becomes particularly useful when people may attend more than one service, group, or gathering.
Average Attendance helps show the typical level of attendance across the periods represented in the widget.
It is useful when individual unusually high or low attendance periods would make a total less helpful than understanding what attendance normally looks like.
Unique Attendees, Averaged applies the same idea to unique attendance, helping you understand the typical number of different people represented across the periods being measured.
Use Filter By Classification when you only want attendance belonging to people with a particular classification.
Leave this set to Any Classification when classification should not affect the result.
This can be useful when your church uses classifications to distinguish groups such as members, guests, children, students, or other organization-specific categories.
Use Filter By Group when the widget should focus on a particular group or attendance context rather than your entire organization.
Depending on your church's setup, the available choices can include groups and meeting times.
Use Entire Organization when you want qualifying attendance across the organization instead.
These two metrics answer different questions.
If 150 attendance records were recorded but some people attended more than once, All Attendance may show 150 while Unique Attendees shows a smaller number.
Neither is inherently the “better” number. Choose the one that matches the ministry question you are trying to answer.
Choose Finance to display financial activity recorded in Connection Card Pro.
Finance options are only available when your user account has permission to view the applicable financial information. The accounts, Funds, and tags available to an individual user can also be limited by that user's permissions.
Income measures incoming financial activity during the selected period.
This is commonly useful for giving and contribution dashboards, but it can also include other income depending on how your church records its finances.
Expenses measures outgoing expenses during the selected period.
Use this for spending summaries, monthly expense tracking, or comparisons against a spending target.
Net Income/Loss shows the difference between applicable income and expenses.
This is useful when the question is not simply how much came in or went out, but the resulting financial position for the activity being measured.
Balance shows the applicable balance rather than simply totaling activity during a period.
Balance behaves differently from income and expense activity and is generally most useful when you want a current or point-in-time financial value.
Finance widgets can be narrowed to:
If you select an Account, you can also choose Include Child Accounts when you want activity from subordinate accounts included in the result.
Available financial tags can include items such as Purposes, Projects, Fundraisers, Departments, and Divisions, depending on your church's setup and your permissions.
The People data source includes both activity-based metrics—such as new guests—and current-state information about the people in your database.
This is also where several options that sound similar have important differences.
New Guests tracks new person records that Connection Card Pro identifies as having originated through applicable guest-facing processes.
It is intended to answer a question such as:
“How many new guests are entering our system?”
It is not simply another name for New Records or New First Attendance.
Connection Card Pro determines the qualifying guest origins automatically.
Digital Guest Card Completions focuses specifically on people added through your Digital Guest Cards.
This is useful for measuring how much activity is coming through your guest-card process independently from other ways new people enter Connection Card Pro.
New Kiosk Registrations counts people newly registered through the kiosk.
Use this when you want to measure the effectiveness or activity of the kiosk registration process specifically.
New First Attendance looks at when a person's first recorded attendance occurred.
This makes it particularly useful for answering:
“How many people actually attended for the first time during this period?”
A person's record could have existed before their first attendance, so this number does not necessarily match New Records.
New Records measures person records created during the selected period.
Unlike New Guests, it is about record creation itself rather than whether the record came from a guest-specific process.
For example, records entered by staff or added through other processes can affect New Records even though they would not necessarily represent a new guest.
It is normal for New Records, New Guests, and New First Attendance to have different totals.
Consider someone whose information was entered before a future event and who later visits for the first time:
Their New Record date and New First Attendance date are different.
Or consider a guest who completes a Digital Guest Card. That person may qualify under Digital Guest Card Completions and New Guests, while those metrics are still answering different questions.
Choose the metric based on what you are trying to learn rather than expecting these numbers to match.
People Active measures people who had qualifying activity such as attendance or check-in during the selected period.
This is useful when you care about recent participation rather than simply whether a person has a record in your database.
Total Number of Records shows the current number of person records.
This is a current-state measurement and is generally most useful as a Big Number rather than as a trend.
Custom List Count shows the current number of people on a selected Custom List.
This works especially well when a Custom List represents something your church wants to keep an eye on, such as:
Because this is a current count, Big Number is generally the most useful presentation.
Choose Field when you want to see how your people are distributed according to information already stored on their profiles.
Available fields include:
For example, an Age Group or Grade widget can help a children's or student ministry understand the makeup of the people currently represented in the database.
These are generally about the current makeup of your people rather than activity that occurred on a particular date.
Choose Custom Field to build a widget around one of your church's own person Custom Fields.
What can be displayed depends on the type of Custom Field and the data stored in it. Connection Card Pro automatically limits the available display choices to combinations supported by that field.
Most People widgets can also be limited to a particular group.
Choose Everyone when the result should include the entire applicable population.
Choose a group when you want to answer a more focused question such as:
Choose Forms when you want to monitor activity from Custom Forms and applications.
Submissions measures forms that have been submitted during the applicable period.
Use this when the completed submission itself is what matters.
Started Applications tracks applications that were started.
An application that was started and later submitted can still be part of the started-application activity, so do not use Started Applications as a substitute for counting only incomplete applications.
This metric can be particularly helpful when you want to see whether people are beginning a process even if they do not all finish it.
Completed Applications measures completed application activity.
Use this when completion status is more important than simply knowing that an application was started.
Where applicable, select All Forms for organization-wide form activity or choose a specific form to focus the widget.
A specific-form widget can be particularly helpful for an ongoing process such as a connection form, volunteer application, ministry request, or another frequently used form.
Choose Events when you want to measure event registration activity.
There are two important types of event measurements:
Registrations counts registration records.
This is useful when you care about how many registrations have been received.
Participants counts the participants registered through those registrations.
This distinction matters when your event allows one registration to include more than one participant.
For example, a household registering several people can produce one registration while representing several participants.
| Use | When... |
|---|---|
| Registrations | The registration itself matters. |
| Participants | You want to know how many people or participant spots are represented. |
Both registration and participant measurements can be configured for:
Use All Events for broad registration activity, a Category for related events, or Specific Event when monitoring one upcoming event.
A filter and a date range do different jobs.
Consider this widget:
Unique Attendance > Children's Ministry > Last 8 Weeks > Trend Line
The pieces mean:
When a widget produces a number you did not expect, check each of those pieces separately.
Not every data source can be displayed every possible way.
For example, a current total may make sense as a Big Number but not as a historical trend. Other measurements can be displayed as a trend but may not make sense as a category breakdown.
Connection Card Pro automatically restricts incompatible combinations in the widget builder. The underlying widget system also treats current-state People metrics differently from time-based activity metrics and restricts when multiple data sources or certain display types can be used.
If a display option is unavailable after you select your data, choose one of the options the builder provides rather than trying to force that data into a presentation that does not fit it.
Some widgets can contain multiple data sources.
This can be useful for comparisons such as:
Under Advanced Options, you can also change the label used for a data source or offset its dates.
Not every metric supports multiple data sources. If you choose a current-state metric such as a list count or another incompatible option, the builder will limit the available choices.
When you're unsure what to select, start with the question you want the dashboard to answer:
| Question | Data Source | Metric |
|---|---|---|
| How much attendance activity did we record? | Attendance | All Attendance |
| How many different people attended? | Attendance | Unique Attendees |
| What does attendance normally look like? | Attendance | Average Attendance |
| How much income was recorded? | Finance | Income |
| How much did we spend? | Finance | Expenses |
| What is the difference between income and expenses? | Finance | Net Income/Loss |
| How many new guest records came through guest processes? | People | New Guests |
| How many people attended for the first time? | People | New First Attendance |
| How many person records were added? | People | New Records |
| How many Digital Guest Cards were completed? | People | Digital Guest Card Completions |
| How many people are currently on a particular list? | People | Custom List Count |
| What does our church or ministry look like by age, grade, or another field? | People | Field |
| How many forms have been submitted? | Forms | Submissions |
| How many event registration records have we received? | Events | Registrations |
| How many participants are registered? | Events | Participants |
The most useful widget is not necessarily the one with the most data. It is the one that answers the question your team actually needs answered.