Everything a pastor needs, in about five minutes

1. 1Create your account. The church name you enter becomes your organization — everyone you invite later shares it.
2. 2Connect Planning Center. Open Settings, click Connect Planning Center, and approve the request in the popup as a Planning Center admin. We ask for read access to Giving, People, Check-Ins, Groups and Services.
3. 3Run your first sync. Click Sync now on the connection card. The first sync pulls history and usually takes 2–10 minutes depending on how many years of records you have. Record counts appear on the card so you can reconcile against Planning Center.
4. 4Set your fiscal year start month in Settings so budget forecasts line up with how your church actually plans.
5. 5Invite your team from Settings (admin, pastor, staff or volunteer) and share a filtered link to the view they should watch.

After the first sync, a scheduled sync runs nightly and only pulls records that changed, with a full refresh once a week as a safety net. You never have to click Sync again unless you want numbers updated immediately.

Once your numbers are in, three screens are worth a look on day one: People shows who is on the roster and where they gather, Giving → Funds tells you how dependent each fund is on a handful of households, and Listening → Results lets you read congregation answers as aggregates, with Listening → Ask a question when you want to put a new question out. Or skip the screens and ask Deacon — once your sync has run, it can answer questions about your numbers in plain language and hand you a written summary.

If you are a Pastor or a Staff member, go to Pastoral care → My care list next. It suggests three households worth a call this week and you can claim them yourself — no one has to hand work to you first. Assignments shows how that work is spread across the team, and Care health shows whether the pace is sustainable.

How the app is laid out: the menu on the left has six places — Deacon, Overview, Reports, Pastoral care, Discipleship and Listening — plus Settings, this Guide and Support. Reports is one menu item with a drop-down that switches between the detail reports: People, Connection, Attendance, Giving, Community and Kids. Areas with more than one screen show tabs across the top: Pastoral care has Households, My care list, Care health and Assignments; Discipleship has Health, Cohorts and Growth pathway; Giving has Trends, Forecast and Funds; Listening has Results, Ask a question, Active and Pooled research; Community has the Community profile and the Household map; Deacon has your conversation, your Investigations and your Work products. Old links still work — they take you to the same screen in its new place.

Overview is the place to start each week. It gives one health line, the areas moving outside their usual range, the opportunities the data suggests, and a short list of recommended next steps. Every step is a link: look at the detail behind it, ask the congregation a question about it, or open the care list.

Where to click: Settings → Data connection

The filter bar sits under the page title and applies to the whole page. Which filters appear depends on the page — attendance uses location and service/event, giving uses campus and membership.

Date range

The window everything is measured over. Comparisons use the same length of time one year earlier.

Grain

Day, week, month or quarter. Grain changes how points are grouped, not what is counted. Weekly is the honest default for attendance; monthly or quarterly is easier for giving conversations.

Campus

Campus as recorded in Planning Center. People with no campus set are grouped separately rather than dropped.

Membership

The membership value on the person's Planning Center record — useful for separating members from regular attenders.

Location / Event

Attendance only. Location is the headcount attendance type (room, service or online); event is the Planning Center check-in event, such as a specific service time.

Filters live in the page URL, so you can copy the address bar and send a staff member the exact view you are looking at.

Overview is written to be read top to bottom, like a briefing rather than a wall of numbers. Church health comes first: a short line in plain language about the direction things are moving, drawn from attendance, how new people are connecting, and giving rhythm together. Areas to watch follows — a handful of specific things that changed enough to deserve a look, each saying what moved and over what period, so you are never left guessing why it is on the list. If there is nothing unusual, it says so instead of inventing concerns.

Below that, each area gets a compact section — attendance, connection and giving — leading with the direction of travel and then the figures behind it. Read the change before the absolute number: flat attendance with fewer new people getting connected is a different story from flat attendance with more.

Attendance

Rolling 8-week average headcount per week, with the change against 8 weeks earlier.

Largest gathering

The attendance type with the most people counted — your main room or service.

New people

Person records added in the window, and how many took a next step.

Serving rate

Share of active attenders scheduled to serve at least once in the window.

Groups participation

Share of active people in at least one group.

Active givers

Distinct giving records with at least one gift in the window (counts, never names).

Total giving

Sum of gifts in the window, with the prior-year comparison.

Engagement pathways

How many people are in a group, serving, giving, or have taken a first step. These overlap — one person can be in all of them — so the numbers do not step down in order and should never be read as drop-off from one stage to the next.

Pastoral attention

How many households the care list is currently surfacing, and how many are already being looked after. Counts only — no names, no contact details and no amounts on this page.

Every figure says what it is built on, and anything the sync cannot support yet reads "Not enough data" rather than showing a number that would mislead you. There is no single overall score, because one number would hide exactly the differences worth acting on.

The last step is the action: households needing attention are named on Pastoral care → My care list, and the deeper reports sit one tab away under each area.

Where to click: Overview

Attendance comes entirely from Planning Center Headcounts — the totals your team enters per service. Adults are rarely checked in individually, so headcounts are the only reliable source; nothing here depends on per-person check-ins.

8- and 13-week averages

Rolling weekly averages that smooth out one-off weeks and seasonal noise.

Where people gather

Each week's attendance split across your attendance types (rooms, services, online) as a share of the week.

Seasonal pattern

Average weekly attendance per calendar month across every synced year, for service planning.

Best and lowest week

The high and low weeks inside the selected range.

Where to click: Reports → Attendance

New people, next steps

Of the people added in this window, how many joined a group, served or gave — and how long it took.

Not yet connected

Active people with no group, no serving and no giving, broken down by campus.

Serving rate

Active attenders scheduled at least once in the window, from Planning Center Services.

Team breakdown

Serving counts per team, so you can see which teams carry the load.

Groups participation

Active people in at least one group, from Planning Center Groups.

Volunteer churn

People who served earlier in the window but not recently — the ones worth a phone call.

Where to click: Reports → Connection

People is the roster view. It counts total people, how many are active, how many records were added in the last 90 days, and how many households those people belong to — all straight from Planning Center People, so the numbers reconcile with what your office sees.

Where they are

People grouped by location, from campus down through the smaller groupings recorded on their records. People with nothing set are shown separately rather than dropped.

Demographics

Breakdowns by segment — the share of people in each — with the option to see how many in a segment have given at least once.

Roster status

Active, Inactive / archived, and New (last 90 days). This is record state in Planning Center, not attendance: an active record does not mean the person was in the room.

Households

Distinct households on the roster, which is the unit pastoral care works in.

Read People next to Attendance rather than instead of it. A growing roster with flat attendance usually means records are being added faster than people are being connected — Connection will show you who has not taken a next step.

Where to click: Reports → People

The Kids page uses individual check-ins from Planning Center Check-Ins, not Headcounts. It focuses on nursery through elementary rooms and the volunteers serving in them.

Total kids

All child check-ins in the selected range. Unique children counts distinct people checked in at least once.

First-time guests

Check-ins where Planning Center marked the child as a first-time guest.

Guest share

Distinct guest children divided by distinct children overall. A high share means many new families are trying the kids ministry.

Volunteer-to-child ratio

Children divided by volunteers for a specific room and service time. Met means at or below the target; Tight is within 10% over; Understaffed is more than 10% over.

Volunteer burnout

Based on kids-team serving records. Tired = 5+ consecutive weeks or 8+ services in 90 days; Burnout risk = 8+ consecutive weeks or 12+ services; Quiet = no service in 4+ weeks.

Sole coverage

A volunteer is the only person scheduled for a kids team in a given service time. Repeated sole coverage is a burnout and safety risk.

Room targets default by age group (nursery 1:3, toddlers 1:5, preschool 1:7, elementary 1:10). Admins can override a target by clicking the ratio in the Rooms table.

Where to click: Reports → Kids

Assignments is where pastoral work is handed out and tracked. It is a rollup of the same care queue, not a new set of numbers: how many households need attention, how many have an owner, how many nobody has taken yet, and how many have gone quiet since someone claimed them. Households with no owner sit at the top, because giving them to someone is the point of the page. Whoever receives one works it on their own care list.

"Gone quiet" means a household was assigned more than 14 days ago and no outreach has been recorded since. Recording a private note is deliberately not outreach, so a note never makes a family look contacted. Snoozed, dismissed and completed households drop out here exactly as they do on the care list, so the counts always agree.

Carrying

How many households needing attention that teammate has taken. A shared household counts for each owner.

Contacted

Assigned households where someone recorded outreach in the last 30 days.

Gone quiet

Assigned over 14 days ago with nothing recorded since. It is a prompt to check in with the teammate, not a judgment.

Everyone on the team is listed, including people carrying nothing, so spare capacity is as visible as overload. Unassigned households can be handed out straight from this page. Pastors and Staff can also pick up unclaimed households themselves from their own care list, so a new teammate never has to wait for a hand-out. Roles are still changed in Settings.

Admins and Pastors can open this view, because it names households the same way the care list does. Staff and Volunteers work their own care list instead. No dollar amounts appear anywhere on the page, and the contents of private notes are never shown here.

Where to click: Pastoral care → Assignments

My care list is where the pastoral work actually happens, so it names people. It shows a stacked card per household — the adults, the children, contact details — ordered by how far their pattern has slipped. It never shows a dollar amount or an individual gift, only rhythm.

It opens on the households assigned to you, because this is your working queue rather than a report. The view switcher shows how many households sit in Assigned to me, Unassigned and Everyone, so you can look wider whenever you need to. Handing work out in bulk lives on Assignments instead, though you can still pass a single household on from its card.

Every household is tagged with what changed, and a household can carry several tags at once: Multiple Changes, Attendance Change, Connection Change, Follow-Up Due, New / Recent Contact and Giving Change. The tags across the top filter the list, and the counts next to them tell you how much sits behind each one. There is no risk score anywhere — a card says "3 recent signals", meaning three things moved, not that anything is wrong.

Each card reads top to bottom like a short briefing. The household name and campus sit at the top, with the strongest signal tag prominent beside it and any supporting tags quieter underneath. "What changed" is the heart of the card: it names each behavioural change and the window it covers — for example attendance over the last 60 days, or a giving rhythm compared with the household's own past. Figures appear only when they are real; the card never invents one. Follow-Up Due is workflow, not a signal — it means somebody took the household on and no contact has been recorded since, so a household can be simply Follow-Up Due with nothing else changed. New / Recent Contact is an opportunity for intentional follow-up, not a concern.

Missing information is not a signal. A quieter Context line notes things like no giving on record, no notes or no survey context — useful to know, but it never counts as a change and never adds to the signal count. "3 recent signals" means three things were actually observed moving; click it to see them. A separate "Pastoral action" line shows who the household is assigned to and what follow-up has been done, because what the data shows and what your team has done are different questions. "More detail" on a card expands the full context, a dated timeline of the recent signals, and the group leaders who already know the family.

Your first three households: the first time a Pastor or Staff member opens this page carrying nobody, the list is replaced by a short panel of the households most in need of attention, with three of them already ticked. Claim them and they become your queue — the first one opens straight into its context panel so you know what to say. Claiming is only a record of who is looking after a family: the household stays on the list, the reason it surfaced does not change, nothing is resolved, and no email goes out when you take a household for yourself. You can share a household a teammate is already carrying, or choose "Not now" — the panel comes back on a later visit if you still carry nobody, and never again once you do.

New to Pastoral care? The first time a pastor, staff member or admin opens any Pastoral care page after the first sync, a short five-step tour walks through the weekly rhythm: the care list, logging touchpoints, the household ledger, handing off, and themes. It follows you across the pages, and you can skip it anytime. To see it again, open /care?tour=1.

The whole screen rests on one distinction. Disciplytics detects a signal. Planning Center supplies pastoral context. Surveys supply congregational context. A rule-based suggestion proposes a possible next step, and AI can help word a message. The pastoral judgment about what is actually happening in someone's life is yours, and the app never makes it for you.

Individual signal

What the data directly observed — a giving rhythm that changed, no active group, no recent serving, children who stopped checking in. Nothing more.

Planning Center context

Notes your team already wrote in Planning Center, from the last 90 days only. Context for the conversation; it never puts anyone on this list.

Congregational context

Aggregate survey findings for cohorts a household falls into, such as married women aged 30-44. It describes the group, never the person, and it never puts anyone on this list.

Suggested next step

A suggestion assembled from the signals by a fixed set of rules — not an AI conclusion and not a diagnosis. On the card it sits below a divider, clearly separate from the evidence above it.

Giving Change is judged against each household's own habit, not a fixed calendar. We take the median number of days between that household's gifts over the last two years, then compare it with the days since the last gift. Extended quiet means at least 90 days and four times the usual gap or more (a single gift followed by 90 quiet days counts too); three to four times the gap, and two to three times the gap, are smaller changes. There are no Safe / Warning / At Risk / Inactive labels anywhere on the screen — only the change itself, and how many changes were observed.

A household with no giving on record never gets a Giving Change tag. There was never a pattern to change, so "no giving on record" is missing information and appears on the quieter Context line instead.

The other two behavioural tags come from participation, and each one names exactly what moved.

• Connection Change — nobody in the household is in an active group, or nobody has served in the last 180 days after having served before. Households that never served are never counted against for it.
• Attendance Change — children on the roster have no check-in in the last 180 days. This is the only attendance behaviour on record today, and households with no children are never counted against for it.
• Follow-Up Due — workflow, not data: somebody was assigned and no contact has been recorded since the most recent assignment. Recording outreach, marking done or dismissing clears it.
• New / Recent Contact — the household was first recorded in Planning Center within the last 90 days. An opportunity for intentional follow-up, not a concern.
• Multiple Changes — several independent behavioural signals moved in the same period. It is shown first because it is a stronger signal, never because the household is in trouble.

View Context opens a focused panel in the same four sections, so you can always see which category a piece of information came from. Nothing is blended into a single confident conclusion, and the app deliberately says "attendance has changed" rather than guessing that somebody is lonely, struggling or drifting.

Draft Message

Opens the outreach composer. Choose email, text or a phone-call prompt, see and toggle exactly which context feeds the draft, then let AI write a warm, short check-in.

What the AI may write

A human, concise note that invites conversation. It may not mention giving, analytics, care status, survey results, Planning Center notes or AI, and it may not claim to know how anyone feels. A draft that breaks any of those rules is rejected and rewritten before you ever see it; if three attempts fail, you get a refusal instead of risky text.

Review before sending

Nothing is ever sent for you. Regenerate, edit freely, then send from your own email client or phone. The card records the handoff, not the message.

Follow-up menu

Add Note, Snooze (a week, a month, three months or a date you pick), Done, and Dismiss. Snoozed and dismissed households leave the queue and come back on their own, and the Snoozed & dismissed view lists them at any time so you can put one straight back on the queue.

Assign to a teammate

Hand a household to whoever should make the call. Anyone on the team can assign, several people can share the same household, and each new person gets an email letting them know. Assigning changes nothing about the signal — it only says who is looking after this family.

Who already knows them

Each card, the context drawer and the assign dialog list the active groups the adults in the household belong to, along with each group's leader and their email or phone from Planning Center. A group leader is often the closest relationship the church has, so they are usually the better first call. Leaders are shown as contacts only — households are still assigned to people who have a Disciplytics login, and the assignment email repeats the same group and leader line. When Planning Center has no leader recorded, it says so instead of guessing.

Record an outcome

In the follow-up history: had a conversation, connected to a group, requested prayer, no response, and so on. Optional, and only you can record it.

Sending a message is not a resolution. The signal stays exactly where it was until someone records an outcome, because an email tells you what your team did, not what is true about a family.

1. 1Start with the category tags across the top: Multiple Changes shows the households where several things moved at once, and Follow-Up Due shows work that is waiting on your team.
2. 2Turn on "Only households missing a connection" under More filters to find the families with nothing else holding them, and start there.
3. 3Open View Context on a card: read why they surfaced, skim any recent Planning Center notes, glance at congregational context, then read the suggested action.
4. 4Draft a message, edit it until it sounds like you, send it, and note what happened — or snooze the household to a date that makes more sense.

Include households with no current signal

Next to Snoozed & dismissed. Widens the list to households nothing has surfaced, for when you want to see everyone in the view rather than only the changes.

Giving + connection

Under "More filters". The default. Orders households on giving rhythm after the connection and attendance signals have been taken into account.

Donation patterns only

Under "More filters". Orders purely on giving rhythm. Connection and attendance changes are still listed beside each household for context.

Only households missing a connection

Under "More filters". Narrows the list to households with at least one connection or attendance gap. Use it with either mode.

Campus filter and search

The campus filter at the top of the app applies here; the search box matches a name, email or phone so you can find a specific family.

Export CSV

Downloads exactly the rows currently shown, with the reasons and contact details, for handing to whoever makes the calls.

Because this screen names people, treat it like your church directory and invite only staff and leaders you would trust with contact details. Admins, Pastors and Staff see every household; Volunteers see only the households assigned to them. Anyone on the team can snooze, dismiss, mark done, record outreach, assign a household and draft a message. Planning Center notes and the private pastoral notes your team writes here are Admin and Pastor only; Staff and Volunteers see the signals and the aggregate context but never that private material. Survey findings are only shown for cohorts above the five-response floor, and an individual's own survey answers are never shown to anyone — not even when they belong to the cohort on screen.

Where to click: Pastoral care → My care list

Households lists every family with its last pastoral touchpoint, who had it, and a short observation. It shows members only at first (people Planning Center marks as "Member"); turn off "Members only" to see everyone. Families nobody has talked to come first, then those past 90 days.

How to use your care time each week: start with My care list ("This week's attention") — the households where something changed recently. Reach out, then use "Log touchpoint" on the card so it counts toward the 90-day rhythm without leaving the page. Then turn to Households ("This quarter's rhythm") for families nobody has talked to or who are coming due. Each card on My care list shows when someone last talked with the family and links to them in Households; a family in Households with a recent change links back to My care list.

Last touchpoint

The most recent call, visit, coffee, text or after-service conversation someone logged, with the observation they wrote. Notes synced from Planning Center count too, so a family with a recent note there won't show as never talked to.

From Planning Center

Notes your church already had in Planning Center appear in the history with this label. They are read-only here, and only admins and pastors see their text — everyone else sees the date and that a note exists.

Next suggested

90 days after the last touchpoint. "Due soon" starts two weeks before that.

Signals

Recent changes from the Care List, shown as context. They never decide who appears here.

Who knows them

Group leaders from Planning Center plus any teammate you mark as knowing the family well. "Hand to them" adds that teammate to the household; nothing is sent to the family.

Suggested group leaders

Group leaders are marked Suggested. If the leader is already on your team (matched by email), use "Hand to them." If not, admins can choose "Invite & hand off": it sends the normal team invite (Volunteer by default) and holds the family, which appears on their care list as soon as they accept. Leaders without an email in Planning Center can't be invited from here.

"What families are walking through" reads the last 90 days of observations and lists shared themes for sermon planning or leadership meetings. It shows themes and counts only, never names or quotes, and only themes five or more households share. It uses one AI request each time you run it. Volunteers see only the households handed to them, and see touchpoint dates but not observations. Notes stay in Disciplytics and are never sent to Planning Center.

Where to click: Pastoral care → Households

Care health measures the process, not the people and not the church. It reads the records the team already creates — who took a household, what contact was recorded, and what was marked finished — and asks whether the load in front of you fits the people carrying it. Every figure appears twice, for the last 30 days and the last 90, so you can see whether things are getting faster or slower rather than judging one number.

Time to first contact

From the moment someone takes a household to the first contact they record. The clearest measure of whether follow-up is keeping up.

Households contacted after being taken

Of the households claimed in the window, the share with any contact recorded. A note is never counted as contact.

Care marked finished

Households claimed in the window that a teammate has since marked done.

Gap between contacts

On households still on the queue, how long passes between one contact and the next.

Typical load per person

The middle of the team, counting people carrying nothing. That is what makes an uneven split visible.

An average only appears once at least five households sit behind it. Below that you see "Not enough yet" instead of a number, because a figure built on two or three households would move wildly and read as a trend when it isn't.

The stretch signals are deliberately framed as capacity, never performance: someone carrying far more than the team norm, households nobody has taken, and first contact taking longer in the last 30 days than across the quarter. "Where to add support" turns those into concrete moves — how many households could shift to teammates with room, and roughly how many more people the queue needs at the team's current pace.

Admins, Pastors and Staff can open this view. Volunteers work their own care list instead. No dollar amounts appear anywhere on the page, and the contents of private notes are never shown here.

Where to click: Pastoral care → Care health

Discipleship is about growth, not care deficits. It has three tabs. Health gives an overview of six areas of formation — belonging, prayer, theology, faith in daily life, ministry and mission — each with a score, a change since the last wave, a status and a short pastoral reading. Until your own survey waves have run, these pages show sample figures from a demo church, marked as such on every page.

Health

The overview: where the congregation looks strong, where to watch, which groups experience things differently, and a journey from Belong to Disciple Others with the biggest gap highlighted. Each area has its own page with the trend, the questions behind the score, and questions worth exploring.

Cohorts

Compare any group — new members, young adults, parents, volunteers, men, women — against the congregation as a whole, area by area. "Custom cohort" opens the survey builder so you can ask that group directly.

Growth pathway

Your church's own discipleship pathway. Admins define the steps (a starter set is provided and can be renamed, reordered or removed). Each person shows their furthest completed step and their next step; tap a step to cycle it through started and completed.

Growth conversations

On the pathway, log a conversation with a person — are they serving, in a group, taking classes — with a free-form note. The 90-day rhythm marks people as talked with this quarter, due, or never, so no one goes a year without a real conversation.

No score appears for a group smaller than five people — you see "Not enough yet" instead, so a handful of answers never reads as a trend. From any area you can Ask Deacon about it, add it to your follow-up list, create a pulse survey to hear directly, or open the Care List. Notes and pathways stay in Disciplytics and are never sent to Planning Center.

Where to click: Discipleship → Health, Cohorts and Growth pathway

Deacon is a coworker for church leaders, not a search box. Ask it a question or hand it a piece of work — an elder-meeting update, an email to households that look like they are drifting, a summary of what changed this quarter — and it looks up your own figures, reads them, and writes something you can use. It only ever works from a fixed set of lookups we build on the server: attendance, connection and serving totals, giving patterns, forecasts, the care list, care follow-up records, survey results that clear the five-response floor, and community comparison. It cannot run its own queries, and it is told to say plainly when the data cannot answer something.

For anything beyond a quick factual question, Deacon starts by stating a short plan before it touches any data: the goal it understood, the few things it intends to look at in order, and what you will end up with. That plan appears above the answer, so you can tell straight away if it misunderstood the assignment.

While it works, the status line moves in plain language — understanding the request, planning the work, gathering the figures, reading what came back, writing it up. Each lookup appears as its own step ("Looking at attendance trends…", "Checking the care list…") and stays attached to the saved answer, so any admin or pastor can open a step later and see the exact figures Deacon read. Deacon stops looking once it has enough; it never pulls every dataset just because it exists.

When something cannot be retrieved, Deacon says which information it could not get and what that leaves uncertain, then answers from what it does have. It never fills a gap with an invented number, never gives the church an overall score, never names anyone's giving, and never makes a theological judgment — the pastoral decision stays with you.

Campus narrative

What the last year looks like at a campus, or across the whole church: attendance, connection, serving, giving and who lives nearby.

What people are carrying

Themes across the pastoral notes your team has written in the last six months, so you can see what people are struggling with.

Stewardship story

How generosity has moved, where it is concentrated, and which funds are carrying the load.

Care sustainability

Whether the follow-up your team is attempting fits the people carrying it.

Every saved analysis keeps the exact figures behind it. Run the same analysis a year later and Deacon compares the two, describing what moved and what held steady — it will not call a change good or bad on its own.

Anything Deacon writes that you would keep or send is saved under Deacon → Work products: emails, briefings, plans, summaries, talking points. Work products belong to the church, not to whoever asked — any admin or pastor can open one, edit it, mark it final, copy it out or archive it, and the full revision history is kept. Each one links back to the conversation that produced it. Outreach is only ever prepared as an unsent draft for a person to review; Deacon never contacts anyone in your church.

Deacon separates how sure it is. It tells you what your figures actually show, the pattern across them, a possible explanation clearly marked as a hunch, and what your own data simply cannot tell you. Alongside most steps there is a "Show me" link that opens the matching screen with the same period and campus already selected, so you can check any figure yourself.

When the numbers show what changed but not why, Deacon says so and offers to prepare the question worth asking your congregation — the survey builder opens with the question, who to ask and a few suggested questions filled in. Nothing is created or sent until you decide.

Some questions take months rather than one answer. Deacon can open an investigation under Deacon → Investigations: the question, what your figures establish so far, what is still unknown, the next step, and every lookup it made along the way. Ask about it again later and it picks the thread back up instead of starting over. Investigations belong to the church, so any admin or pastor can open one.

Children's ministry is included now too: Deacon can look at how many children are checking in, guests and first-timers, households reached, and whether rooms were staffed, and connect that with what is happening in the rest of the church.

The page itself: Worth knowing and your Saved analyses sit in the left rail. Worth knowing is two to four things Deacon noticed in your recent data — calculated from the same figures as the Overview, never generated — and each one links to the page where you can look closer or drops a matching question into the box. Above the message box, a single "Try asking" idea rotates through suggested questions; tap it to use it. The plus button beside the message box is where the tools live — run a full analysis, put a question or report on a rhythm, check your usage for this period, or add more analyses if you are an admin. Conversations are saved for your church, so any admin or pastor on the account can open one again, pick it back up, or delete it.

Rhythms, under the plus menu, come in two forms. A question of your own — typed in, or carried over from an answer with "Email this on a rhythm" — is looked at again on the schedule you choose and the full written answer arrives by email, with a link to the same answer and its evidence in the app. A saved report runs one of the fixed analyses as before. Choose weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, the day for a weekly rhythm, and the hour, in your own time zone. Yearly reports are the ones that line year up against year. Questions can be emailed to anyone on your team; when a rhythm reaches beyond Admins and Pastors, that run cannot read private pastoral notes at all. Saved reports stay with Admins and Pastors because some of them draw on those notes, and every list is checked again at send time, so someone who has changed role or left stops receiving it. "Send now" beside a rhythm runs it immediately so you can see what arrives. If your AI credits have run out the run is skipped rather than queued, so nothing is spent without you.

Usage: every church gets a monthly allowance, shown under Usage this period in the plus menu rather than on the page itself. A question costs a small fraction of a full analysis, and Deacon will not start an analysis your allowance cannot finish. When you are nearly out you will see a short note under the message box; an admin can add more from the plus button, and anything purchased does not expire while the monthly allowance still resets on the 1st.

Only Admins and Pastors can open Deacon, because parts of its work draw on private pastoral notes and giving patterns.

Where to click: Deacon, and Deacon → Work products

Giving is the leadership overview: received so far this fiscal year, the likely year-end figure with its range, and one plain status. The detailed forecasting, segmentation and planning work lives on the Forecast tab of Giving.

Likely year-end

Recorded months plus a projection of the months still ahead, shown as a range rather than one certain number.

Giving pace

Where your own past years say you would be by this point. It needs at least two full prior years of your history; otherwise it reads Not enough data. We never assume a twelfth of the year per month.

Status

On track means on or ahead of your historical pace and within 5% of last year's total. Worth watching means behind pace, or 5–15% below last year. Needs attention means both. No giving goal or budget is assumed anywhere on this page.

Expectation changes

From the second month onward, the page notes how the year-end expectation has moved since the previous month.

Year over year

Grouped bars. The x-axis is the period within the year (day, week, month or quarter) and the bars are this year against last year, so like periods sit side by side.

Trend

One continuous line on real calendar dates — best for spotting drift, one-off spikes and the effect of a campaign.

Small multiples

Turn on a breakout by campus or membership and you get one small chart per segment on a shared scale, instead of a tangle of lines.

Nothing on this page shows an individual donor. Every figure is an aggregate.

Where to click: Reports → Giving → Trends

The page opens with one planning figure for the budget year — what to plan on, what you have recorded so far, and a cautious and an optimistic number either side of it. Under that sit the month-by-month and by-line tables, a short list of what makes this forecast less certain, and links onward to Giving and Deacon. Everything technical is still here, behind Open detailed analysis.

The forecast is built bottom-up: each segment (campus, and optionally membership) is forecast on its own seasonal history, then the segments are added together. That captures the fact that a young campus and a long-established one grow differently, while still reporting one total.

Fiscal year

Totals roll up to your fiscal year, set by the start month in Settings.

Cautious and optimistic

The low and high ends of the range. They come from conformal prediction — the model is scored against periods it never saw, and the size of its past misses sets the width. Change the confidence level under Detailed analysis.

In-sample accuracy

Under Detailed analysis: how the model performed on held-back history. Use it to decide how much to trust the line before you budget against it.

Unattributed giving

Gifts with no donor record attached. Called out in Things to know because it cannot be forecast from donor behaviour — treat it as planning uncertainty.

1. 1Pick the budget year at the top: this year, next year, or the next 12 months.
2. 2Read the central figure as the expectation, not the plan.
3. 3Budget committed costs to the cautious number, and treat the gap up to the central figure as your discretionary or contingency layer.
4. 4Read Things to know about this forecast. If unattributed giving is a large share, widen your contingency rather than trusting the range alone.
5. 5Open Detailed analysis when you need a single campus, a different grain, or the model scores.

Where to click: Reports → Giving → Forecast

Households are grouped into cohorts using RFM — how Recently they gave, how Frequently, and how much Monetary value. No names, only cohorts and counts.

Recency

How long since the last gift. Recent givers respond to appeals; long-lapsed ones rarely do.

Frequency

How many separate gifts in the window. Frequency separates habitual givers from one-time responders.

Monetary

Total given in the window.

Cohort tiers

Combinations of the three, in plain terms: committed, steady, occasional, new, at-risk and lapsed.

Fund lifetime value

Average total a household in each cohort gives to the fund across its lifetime — useful for judging which cohorts actually sustain a fund.

Cohorts sit on the same page as Fund health, below the concentration and flow sections.

Where to click: Reports → Giving → Funds

Fund health looks at the shape of a fund's support rather than its total. Everything is measured at household level and reported as counts, shares and averages — no household is ever named or listed.

Concentration

How much of the fund comes from its top households — the top 1%, 5% and 10% shares. High concentration is not wrong, it is a risk to know about: if two families move, the fund moves with them.

Gini

One number from 0 to 1 summarising how evenly giving is spread. Near 0 means many households giving similar amounts; above about 0.7 means the fund leans heavily on a few.

Donor flows

Year over year, how many giving households were new, retained from last year, or lapsed. A flat total with heavy lapse and heavy new is a churning base, not a stable one.

Congregational reach

Share of active households at each campus and membership type that gave to this fund — how far into the congregation the fund actually reaches.

Donor lifecycle

How long it typically takes a household to give a second time, and how long support usually lasts. Tells you when a follow-up is still worth making.

Opportunity matrix

Segments crossed by reach and average gift, so you can see where support is thin but plausible versus already saturated. Each cell suggests the Planning Center list to build to reach it.

Actions strip

The two or three moves the numbers most support this quarter, written as pastoral next steps.

Privacy floors apply: any segment with fewer than 3 households is suppressed, and concentration figures need at least 5 households before they are shown.

1. 1Pick the fund at the top of the page.
2. 2Read concentration first — it sets how much risk any other number carries.
3. 3Check the flow table: is the base growing, holding, or churning?
4. 4Use reach to find the campus or membership group that gives least to this fund, then work the opportunity matrix cell for it.
5. 5Build the suggested list in Planning Center and make the ask there — Disciplytics stays aggregate-only by design.

Where to click: Reports → Giving → Funds

Evaluations are longitudinal: you run the same question set as waves over time, so you can watch a measure move rather than reading a single snapshot. Two question sets are built in — a broader church health assessment and a short pulse — and the evaluation builder walks you through designing your own.

The builder follows the same order a researcher would: what you are trying to learn (the learning objective), who you should ask (the cohort), what the questions are actually measuring (constructs and measures), and only then the wording of the questions themselves.

Learning objective

The decision you want the evaluation to inform — evaluating a ministry, understanding belonging, checking volunteer health. It drives which measures are recommended.

Cohort

Who gets asked, resolved live from your Planning Center data: everyone, volunteers, former volunteers, parents of children's-ministry kids, small-group participants, new contacts, new members, leaders, or a ministry's participants. The builder shows how many people the cohort contains and how many are reachable by email.

Construct

The underlying idea being measured, such as belonging or parent partnership. Results group measures under their construct.

Measure

A small set of questions that together score one construct, with its scale and whether it is validated. Each measure gets a score out of 5 and a wave-over-wave change.

Wave

One run of an evaluation with its own open and close. Comparing waves is where the value is: run the same pulse each quarter.

Invites

Sent by email to Planning Center people who have an email address on their record. Invitations honour the evaluation's cohort and can be narrowed further to one campus.

Shareable link

Every wave also has a public link on your Disciplytics address you can put in a bulletin, text or slide for people you don't have emails for.

Response rate

Invites sent against responses received, per wave — read it before you read the results.

Measure trend

Every measure now charts its score across every wave of the evaluation, not just against the previous one. A wave that fell under the 5-response floor shows as a gap labelled "suppressed" — never as a zero.

Compare by

A selector above the measure sections that splits each measure score by group: cohort, campus, membership, gender, marital status, age band, households with children, distance from campus, tenure, attendance frequency, serving, giving and small-group participation. Each group shows its score and how many people answered.

Equity check

A panel at the top of the results that lists every measure and group sitting a meaningful distance below the church-wide average, ordered by the size of the gap, so no one has to work through every dimension by hand.

Results are aggregate-only. No one — not your staff, not Disciplytics — can open an individual submission from the app, and any measure, question or segment with fewer than 5 responses is suppressed rather than shown. Tell your congregation that plainly when you invite them; it is the reason the answers will be honest.

Answers can also feed the optional pooled discipleship research program, which an Admin turns on in Settings and each respondent chooses separately. See the Pooled research topic for what it involves and how it is protected.

That floor applies to the equity views too. Any demographic group with fewer than 5 responses is marked "too few responses" instead of being scored, which is what keeps small slices — a handful of single adults at one campus, for example — from becoming identifiable.

Read the results associationally. A measure moving alongside a change you made is a signal worth following up on with people, not proof that the change caused it. The same is true of an equity gap: it tells you where to go and ask, not why the gap exists.

1. 1Open Listening → Ask a question and choose the closest goal: take a quick pulse, assess congregational health, evaluate a program or understand a group.
2. 2For a pulse or congregational assessment, review the established question set, name it and choose how often it should repeat.
3. 3For a program, name what you are evaluating and build a short Ministry Model: its purpose, its activities and the outcomes you hope to see. Then choose who should answer.
4. 4Match library questions to those intended outcomes, or write a question unique to your church. The optional Question Coach can help clarify your wording before you add it.
5. 5Read the review step's design warnings — length, duplicate constructs, too many open-ended questions — then deploy, which opens wave 1.
6. 6Send invites to the cohort's synced email addresses, and share the public link for everyone else.
7. 7Leave it open one to two weeks, then read results by construct and measure.
8. 8Read the equity check first — it names the groups scoring below average — then set Compare by to the dimension it flagged to see the whole picture for that measure.
9. 9Repeat the same evaluation next quarter and watch each measure's trend across waves.

Where to click: Listening → Results

Admins only. Start by choosing what you need to understand: take a quick pulse, assess congregational health, evaluate a program or understand a group. The first two use established Disciplytics surveys. Program and group evaluations open the guided builder only after you have chosen the focus.

1. 1For Take a quick pulse, review the Quarterly Pulse. For Assess congregational health, review the Congregational Health Assessment. Confirm its name, repeat schedule and background questions before creating it.
2. 2To evaluate a program, name the ministry or initiative, then describe its purpose, activities and intended outcomes in a short Ministry Model. Those outcomes replace the preset learning-goal choices.
3. 3To understand a group, choose the group first. The live count shows how many people are in it and how many can be reached by email, then you choose what you need to learn.
4. 4For each intended outcome, choose relevant library questions or write one that reflects your church's ministry. Church-written questions are clearly identified and are never described as validated.
5. 5Use the optional Question Coach inline to check wording, then accept, edit or ignore its suggestion before adding the question.
6. 6Read the design check, review the survey, then create it. Focused evaluations open wave 1 immediately; established surveys wait on Active surveys until you open their first wave.

Group evaluations continue to use curated learning goals, measures and the question bank. Program evaluations use the church's Ministry Model as their goal and can combine relevant library questions with church-written questions. Results remain aggregate-only and groups under 5 responses stay hidden.

Where to click: Listening → Ask a question

Admins only. This is the running side of listening: open a wave, invite people, watch the response count, then close it when you have enough replies. Nothing here changes the answers or how they are reported.

Wave

One run of a survey with its own open and close. Comparing waves is where the value is: run the same pulse each quarter.

Invites

Emailed to Planning Center people who have an email address on their record. Invitations honour the survey's cohort and can be narrowed to one campus.

Shareable link

Every open wave also has a public link on your Disciplytics address you can put in a bulletin, text or slide for people you have no email for.

Response rate

Invites sent against responses received, per wave — read it before you read the results.

If an invitation run reports nobody new, everyone matching the filter has already been invited, or their Planning Center records have no email address yet. Add the emails in Planning Center and run a sync from Settings.

Where to click: Listening → Active

Pooled research is entirely optional. An Admin joins the program in Settings by choosing your church tradition and accepting the research agreement; nothing is contributed before that, and an Admin can withdraw at any time. Withdrawing stops future answers qualifying and removes your past contribution from the pooled results where it can still be recalculated.

Once your church is enrolled, every survey adds a separate optional choice for the person answering. It is genuinely optional — skipping it does not stop their answers counting for your own church results. Only answers where the church is enrolled and the person opted in are ever pooled.

Question

Pick one scored question that is part of the pooled set. Written comments are never included, so nothing anyone typed leaves your church.

Demographic

View averages by age, gender, marital status, how long people have attended, or how often they attend.

Church tradition

Each row also shows the tradition the answers came from, so you can see how a group compares across traditions rather than across named churches.

People and churches

Every row says how many people and how many churches it is built from, so you can judge how much weight it carries.

A group is only shown when it has at least 10 people from at least 3 different churches. Anything thinner is withheld rather than shown, which is what makes it impossible to work back to a church or a person. Churches are never named, ranked or compared by name — not in the app and not in anything published.

Where to click: Listening → Pooled research

Community profile

US Census demographics for the area around a campus address — population, income, age, race and education — set beside the same measures for your congregation.

Household map

Household density by ZIP area around each campus. All campuses stay pinned on the map; click a pin to re-anchor.

Campus overlap

ZIP areas served by more than one campus, which campus is strongest there, and whether a household has a closer campus than the one it attends.

Privacy suppression

ZIP areas with very few households are suppressed so no cluster can identify a family.

Campus addresses come from Planning Center Campuses and are geocoded during sync. If a campus is missing from the map, add its street address in Planning Center and run a sync.

Where to click: Reports → Community → Community profile and Household map

Every report in Disciplytics is only as good as the Planning Center data behind it. The Data quality page checks four things — sync health, people records, giving integrity and engagement freshness — and marks each Good, Needs attention or Missing, in plain language.

Sync health

When data last came across, whether the connection needs reconnecting, and any errors or warnings from the last sync.

People records

What share of your people have an email, phone, address and household. Low coverage is why some features go quiet — surveys need emails, the household map needs addresses.

Giving integrity

How many gifts are not linked to a person or a fund. Unlinked gifts can make giving totals differ from your books and hide a household's quiet change from the care list.

Engagement freshness

How recent your attendance counts, check-ins, group rosters and serving schedules are. Stale data silently misleads the care list.

Every item that needs attention says why it matters and how to fix it. Fixes always happen in Planning Center; afterwards run a sync from Settings and the page reflects the improvement. Admins, pastors and staff can open it.

Where to click: Reports → Data quality, or the Data quality card in Settings

Admin

Manages the Planning Center connection, fiscal year, invitations and roles.

Pastor

Sees every report including giving, plus the private pastoral notes, but cannot change the connection, billing or the team.

Staff

Sees every report including giving and can run a manual sync, but not account settings or private notes.

Volunteer

Sees attendance, serving, groups and kids, plus only the care households assigned to them. Never sees giving amounts.

1. 1Open Settings → Team and send an invitation by email with the role you want.
2. 2The invitee creates an account from the invitation link and joins your organization automatically.
3. 3Revoke a pending invitation or change a role at any time from the same panel.

Where to click: Settings → Team

• Giving amounts are only ever shown as aggregates. No screen shows a person's or a household's dollar figures, and there is no donor-level giving list.
• One screen names people: the care list shows household and member names with contact details and a count of recent signals derived from giving rhythm and connection indicators, for pastoral follow-up. It shows no amounts. Admins, Pastors and Staff see every household; Volunteers see only the households a teammate has assigned to them. Invite accordingly.
• Survey answers are aggregate-only. Individual submissions are not viewable in the app, and any segment with fewer than 5 responses is suppressed.
• A nightly sync pulls only records changed since the last run, using a per-entity watermark, so it is fast and safe to repeat.
• A full refresh runs weekly to catch anything a changed-since query could miss, such as deletions.
• Planning Center access tokens are encrypted at rest and are only ever used by the server, never sent to the browser.
• Your data is isolated per organization at the database level, so one church can never read another's records.
• Disconnecting Planning Center in Settings stops all syncing immediately.

Where to click: Settings → Data connection

"Redirect URI is malformed or doesn't match"

The callback URL in your Planning Center application does not match this site. Settings shows the exact callback URL with a copy button — paste it into the Planning Center application and try again.

No campus on anyone

Campus comes from the person's Planning Center record. Run a manual sync after setting campuses; if it is still empty, confirm the People permission was approved when you connected.

Attendance is empty

Attendance uses Headcounts only. If your team has not entered a headcount for the services in the window, the chart will be empty even though the sync succeeded — individual check-ins are not counted.

Numbers look stale

Check the last sync time on the connection card in Settings and click Sync now. Very recent gifts entered in Planning Center are picked up on the next sync, not instantly.

Counts don't match Planning Center

The connection card shows record counts per entity for reconciliation. Small differences are usually refunded or deleted records; if a whole entity is missing, reconnect so the current permissions are granted.

Where to click: Settings → Data connection