Attendance trends

This report answers “are we growing, flat, or declining?” — with enough granularity to tell the difference between one bad week and a real trend.

Views

Weekly (default): total attendance per week, last 12 months.
Monthly: aggregated by month, last 5 years.
YoY (year-over-year): each week compared against the same week prior year.
Per service: if you run multiple services per Sunday, see each separately.
Per campus: compare campuses.
Per special service: group by type (Sunday, youth, mid-week).

4-week moving average

The main chart line is a 4-week moving average (MA-4) that smooths out the noise of holidays and bad weather. Thin bars show raw weekly data for detail.

Seasonality

The system auto-detects patterns:

Easter Sunday: typical peak +40% vs MA-4.
Summer (Jul-Aug in northern hemisphere): typical dip -15%.
Back-to-school (Sep): rebound +20%.
End of year (Dec 24-31): dip -25%.

When a drop coincides with a known seasonal pattern, the report marks it with a ⓘ icon saying “expected from seasonality” to avoid false alarms.

8-week forecast

Using a time-series model (simple SARIMA), Ministrium forecasts expected attendance for the next 8 weeks with an 80% confidence interval:


Wk 22 (projected): 480 ± 35
Wk 23 (projected): 470 ± 40   ← summer kick-off
Wk 24 (projected): 455 ± 45

Useful for planning room capacity, volunteers, and coffee.

Outlier detection

A week is marked an outlier if its value is outside ± 2σ of the MA-4. Happens with extreme weather, external events (elections, national soccer match). Hover on the outlier to see public-calendar events that coincided.

Weather data included

We cross your attendance with weather data for the campus location (via OpenWeatherMap). If it poured rain Sunday, you’ll see a tag over the bar.

Demographic splits

Same data, different cuts:

By age: children (0-12), youth (13-25), adults (26-59), seniors (60+).
By gender: optional, only if the church captures this field.
By marital status: to understand if couples are showing up.
First-time vs recurring: how much growth is retention vs new.

Cohort analysis

An advanced tool: it groups members by month of first check-in and shows what % still attends 1, 3, 6, 12 months later.


Jan-25 cohort:  100% → 78% → 61% → 47% → 34%
Feb-25 cohort:  100% → 81% → 66% → 52% → ...
Mar-25 cohort:  100% → 75% → 58% → ...

This is the most honest assimilation indicator. A church that grows but loses 70% of new people in 6 months has a discipleship problem, not an evangelism problem.

Export

CSV with one row per week × campus × service. Great for Excel or Google Sheets analysis.