Engagement Scoring
How Parable measures recent engagement, and how to tune it for your church
What It Is
Parable uses recent, recorded activity to describe a person's participation in church life. When enough score-bearing activity is available, the person profile leads with:
- an engagement tier — where they sit today
- a warning light — whether they need a look from your team
When there is not enough score-bearing activity, the profile can show Unscored or No activity instead of a tier.
When your access permits it, the profile also shows points in the engagement facts line. The current calculation produces a weighted score from 0 to 100; the tier and warning light give that number context.
Start with Read a person profile for the current tabs, permission boundaries, and missing-data states.
The goal is not to replace pastoral wisdom. It is to help your team see quickly who is deeply connected, who may be drifting, and who may need follow-up.
Engagement scoring is configured under Settings → Engagement. The
available controls depend on your permissions; viewing the page requires
view data access (data.view). Category weight sliders also require
Summary or Full giving access. Editing tier thresholds, alert sensitivity, activity types,
and the Person Engagement sync setting requires update organization
access (organization.update). Calculate Scores requires that same
access. Sync to Planning Center requires manage integrations access
(integrations.manage) and appears when Person Engagement sync is enabled.
Access and Missing Data
Giving permissions affect the information you can see. Summary access can show giving events and a relative contribution without individual gift amounts; None withholds the giving activity and breakdown. Other feature and data permissions still apply, and exact aggregate values may be withheld.
A Scoring hasn't caught up with this church's records yet notice means the shown events come from the Planning Center sync and are not what the engagement position is counting. Scoring is still catching up with some of this church's records means part of the timeline is not counted yet. Engagement scoring has not been calculated for this person yet is a separate state. Unscored means the person is within the new-member grace period without enough score-bearing activity to assess engagement. No activity means no tracked activity has been observed for the person. Review integration progress and let processing complete before interpreting any of these states as a low score.
See Access, roles, and giving permissions and Read a person profile.
How the Score Is Built
Scoring runs in four steps.
Collect activity
Eligible synced records supply dated activity events for Attendance, Giving, Groups, Serving, Forms, Events, and Communications. A record can appear in the activity timeline before its scoring contribution is ready.
Decay each event
Each event is worth base points on the day it happens and loses value smoothly over time, following an exponential decay curve.
Normalize each category
The decayed points in each category are converted to a 0–100 category score.
Blend the categories
Category scores are combined using your configured weights to produce the overall 0–100 score.
The Decay Formula
A single event contributes:
points = base_points × e^(−λ × hours_since_event)λ (lambda) is derived from the applicable half-life — the number of days
after which an event is worth half what it was:
λ = ln(2) ÷ (half_life_days × 24)With Giving's default 70-day half-life, a gift's event points contribute half as much after ten weeks and a quarter as much after twenty weeks. The scoring contribution comes from configured event points, rather than the gift amount. Activity types can have their own points and a half-life override.
Turning Points Into a Category Score
For every category except Groups:
category_score = min(total_decayed_points ÷ base_points × 100, 100)In practice a category maxes out at 100 once a person has roughly one full-value event's worth of undecayed points — so sustained activity holds a category near its ceiling, while a single old event sits low.
Groups is scored differently, because belonging and showing up are different signals:
- Group membership is worth up to 35 points
- Group event attendance is worth up to 65 points, reaching the full bonus at about 4 attended group events
- The two are added together and capped at 100
Blending Into the Overall Score
total = Σ (category_score × weight) ÷ Σ weightDividing by the total weight means disabling a category re-normalizes the rest rather than dragging everyone's score down. The result is capped at 100.
What Counts Toward the Score
| Category | Default weight | Base points | Half-life | What counts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attendance | 10% | 100 | 35 days | Check-ins tied to a person, plus caregiver check-ins — a parent who checks in a child gets credit |
| Giving | 25% | 150 | 70 days | Donations with payment status succeeded |
| Groups | 25% | 100 | 35 days | Joining a group, and attending group events where attendance was recorded |
| Serving | 20% | 100 | 49 days | Plan people with a confirmed status, dated from when the status was last updated |
| Forms | 5% | 100 | 35 days | Form submissions tied to a person |
| Events | 10% | 100 | 35 days | Active, non-canceled attendee records tied to a person |
| Communications | 5% | 50 | 10 days | Messages with a recorded read timestamp |
The table shows the calculation's category defaults. The Settings → Engagement page provides category weight sliders and activity-type controls for event points and half-life overrides, subject to your access. It does not provide category base-point, category half-life, or category on/off controls.
What Does Not Count
- People whose Planning Center status is not
activeare excluded from regular scoring and are placed in the Inactive tier instead. - Donations that did not succeed, and donations not linked to a person.
- Canceled or inactive registrations, and attendees that can't be tied to a person.
- Messages that were never opened — Communications requires a read receipt.
- Group events with no recorded attendance.
- Activity dated before the person existed in Planning Center.
Why Categories Fade at Different Speeds
The half-lives encode how long each signal stays meaningful:
- Giving (70 days) fades slowest — giving is periodic, so a monthly giver should not look disengaged in week three.
- Serving (49 days) is next, matching typical volunteer rotations.
- Attendance, Groups, Forms, Events (35 days) sit in the middle.
- Communications (10 days) fades fastest — opening an email is a weak, short-lived signal, and a longer half-life would let it mask real absence.
Engagement Tiers
Tiers are cutoffs on the overall score. The defaults are:
| Tier | Default score range | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| Highly Engaged | 40+ | Strong, recent involvement across church life |
| Engaged | 20–39.99 | Healthy involvement |
| Moderate | 10–19.99 | Some regular connection |
| Low | 1–9.99 | Limited recent connection |
| Disengaged | Below 1 | Very little recent activity |
| Inactive | — | Assigned regardless of score when the person's Planning Center status is not active |
These thresholds look low compared with a school grade, and that is deliberate. Because every signal decays, a score near 40 already means consistent, recent activity across several categories. Tune the cutoffs under Settings → Engagement → Tier Thresholds to match how your church talks about involvement.
Warning Lights
The warning light answers a different question from the tier: not "how involved is this person?" but "has something changed?"
Parable evaluates two independent signals and takes the more concerning of the two.
Signal 1 — Activity Heartbeat
How long since the person did anything at all:
| Time since last activity | Light |
|---|---|
| Under 4 weeks | Green |
| 4+ weeks | Yellow |
| 8+ weeks | Red |
| 90+ days | Orange (Lapsed) |
| 180+ days | Slate (Dormant) |
The 4- and 8-week thresholds are configurable (1–12 weeks, yellow ≤ red). The 90- and 180-day Lapsed and Dormant gates are fixed.
Signal 2 — Trend Against Their Own Baseline
Parable tracks each person against their own normal, not the congregation's:
- EMA — an exponential moving average of the daily score, which smooths out day-to-day noise. Each day it moves 5% of the way toward the current score.
- Baseline — the rolling average of the person's monthly score snapshots (default: the last 6 months, requiring at least 3 snapshots).
Once someone is past the grace period, a missing baseline no longer holds them at White — they are judged on the activity heartbeat alone until enough monthly snapshots exist for the trend signal to switch on.
| Recent EMA vs. baseline | Light |
|---|---|
| At or above 75% | Green |
| Below 75% | Yellow |
| Below 50% | Red |
This is what catches the faithful attender who quietly halves their involvement while still technically showing up — the heartbeat signal alone would miss them.
The Neutral States
| Light | Label | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Gray | No Data | No activity has ever been recorded for this person |
| White | New | Has activity but no baseline yet, and either is still inside the new-member grace period (default 90 days) or has no Planning Center created date |
| Green | Healthy | Neither signal has crossed a threshold |
| Yellow | Needs Attention | Fading on at least one signal |
| Red | Urgent | Significantly absent or significantly down |
| Orange | Lapsed | 90+ days with no activity |
| Slate | Dormant | 180+ days with no activity |
Yellow, Red, Orange, and Slate are the four statuses that appear in engagement alerts. Gray, White, and Green never raise an alert.
Gray and White remain part of the calculation and Planning Center sync. The person profile hides the No Data and New lights. It shows Unscored or No activity for the missing-activity states described above.
A warning light is a prompt for a conversation, not a verdict. It tells your team where a personal check-in may be worth the time.
When Scoring Runs
- Daily — every enabled organization is rescored, the EMA advances, and warning lights are recalculated. This runs on its own schedule, independent of whether a Planning Center sync completed that day.
- Monthly — a permanent score snapshot is written for every person. These snapshots supply the baseline history. A person without a baseline can have a calculated White light during the new-member grace period, which can sync to Planning Center. The person profile hides that light. After the grace period, activity recency still determines the calculated light while baseline history builds.
Writing Scores Back to Planning Center
Under Settings → Engagement → Planning Center Sync you can push engagement data back into Planning Center as custom fields on each person using the Person Engagement toggle. It writes the engagement tier and warning light.
Parable creates and maintains its own tab and field definitions in Planning Center, and syncs run automatically after each calculation when enabled. The toggle starts off and requires permission to manage engagement settings.
Related Guides
- For a broad view of your church data, start with Planning Center Overview.
- For people-focused analysis, see People Overview.
- For giving-specific engagement, see Giving Stages.
- For custom SQL examples, see People Advanced Queries, Groups Advanced Queries, and Services Reporting Examples.