Attendance Question

As areas return to in person meetings from virtual it would be great to be able to determine how many in person members will be at the meeting vice virtually. The attendance question on FTH Agenda page has 3 responses - Yes, No, Uncertain. Can we change that to Virtually, In Person and Uncertain?

Is there another way besides the notes section to capture this type of information? Any creative thoughts are appreciated.

We want this feature to determine if it is worth having an in person meeting if only a couple would show up.

Thank you for all the AMAZING work you do on FTH. It is a fabulous tool that supports club with so much more than meeting sign ups. Every iteration gives new functionality that has exceeded my expectations.

Let me think on this...

While it seems like a reasonable request, it is *not* a small change. The attendance functionality and logic is integrated into a lot of places in FTH--that is why it took so long to add attendance functionality to the system in the first place. I am not saying I would not implement it... it would just take a lot of planning on best approach and implementation. Not likely to happen soon.

Consider all the ways that attendance can be selected and reported... For example, there are buttons for reporting your planned attendance in the emailed agenda... Those would have go from 2 Yes/No buttons to something else (like 3 buttons). There are a number of other examples I can give.

Steve:
This is a bit of a one off. I would not expect you to make the change based on current conditions. As we move back to in-person meetings it would be helpful. We can send out surveys to accomplish the same or have folks use the notes section. I was hoping it was just a list that could be modified. Thank you for the quick response. The FTH Team Rocks. You keep us moving.forward with a tool that supplements a great organization. I can't say enough about how flexible FTH is for our club.
Greg Lane

Thanks... I do think this would be worth pursuing at some point. However, would like other users to also have a chance to chime in via the Improvement Suggestions section.

Does changing the attendance choices from three to something else exacerbate the programming complexity of implementing this suggestion?

How about the following approach?

No
Yes (Online)
Yes (In Room)

Remove the ‘Uncertain’ choice. The attendance reports appear to already assume 'Uncertain' is the default state when Yes/No is not selected.

Legend:
N/A - No attendance information found.
? - Attendance was never confirmed as Yes or No.
Y - Attendance was confirmed as attending (Yes).
R - Attendance was confirmed as attending REMOTELY (Yes, remotely).
N - Attendance was confirmed as not attending (No).

wrote:

Does changing the attendance choices from three to something else exacerbate the programming complexity of implementing this suggestion?

How about the following approach?

No
Yes (Online)
Yes (In Room)

Remove the ‘Uncertain’ choice. The attendance reports appear to already assume 'Uncertain' is the default state when Yes/No is not selected.

Legend:
N/A - No attendance information found.
? - Attendance was never confirmed as Yes or No.
Y - Attendance was confirmed as attending (Yes).
R - Attendance was confirmed as attending REMOTELY (Yes, remotely).
N - Attendance was confirmed as not attending (No).

Short answer, yes. The way it is now involved a *lot* of thought, discussion, and experimentation. Suffice to say that I just do not think you fully realize how much this attendance functionality is interwoven throughout the system. Something along the lines of upgrading to central air conditioning in an old house. It was a major undertaking and I am not inclined to just be making any old changes to it.

>>> For example, consider the subtle but important detail that the system specifically checks who has stated will not be attending a meeting (and disables their list entry) before presenting you a drop-down in the agenda editor to select from for assigning someone to a role. That one check was about a man-week of work because nothing ever existed at all like that in the agenda editor--we never disabled anyone in the drop-downs in the past. Not only did I have to come up with the logic based on attendance to disable someone in the list, but I had to figure out to best show the user "why?" in a very limited space. I eventually came up with using tool tips for the explanation, but it is not perfect... it was the best approach I could come up with in the very limited screen space. It required a lot of thought and careful consideration. You all just see that the system grays out someone in the drop-down, but there is a lot more going on there than you might think.