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What It Is

Parable’s engagement score is a single 0–100 number describing how connected a person has been to the life of your church recently. Alongside the score, every person gets:
  • an engagement tier — where they sit today
  • a warning light — whether they need a look from your team
  • a trend — whether their score is rising, falling, or flat
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. Every default on this page can be changed there.

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How the Score Is Built

Scoring runs in four steps.
1

Collect activity

Parable turns synced Planning Center records into dated activity events — one per check-in, donation, group membership, serving assignment, form submission, registration, or message read.
2

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.
3

Normalize each category

The decayed points in each category are converted to a 0–100 category score.
4

Blend the categories

Category scores are combined using your configured weights to produce the overall 0–100 score.

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The Decay Formula

A single event contributes:
λ (lambda) is derived from the category’s half-life — the number of days after which an event is worth half what it was:
So with Giving’s 70-day half-life, a $200 gift counts fully the week it lands, half as much ten weeks later, and a quarter as much twenty weeks after that. It never quite reaches zero, but it fades out of relevance.

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Turning Points Into a Category Score

For every category except Groups:
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

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Blending Into the Overall Score

Dividing 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.

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What Counts Toward the Score

Weights, base points, half-lives, and whether a category counts at all are per-organization settings.

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What Does Not Count

  • People whose Planning Center status is not active are 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.

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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, Registrations (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.

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Engagement Tiers

Tiers are cutoffs on the overall score. The defaults are:
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.

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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.

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Signal 1 — Activity Heartbeat

How long since the person did anything at all: The 4- and 8-week thresholds are configurable (1–12 weeks, yellow ≤ red). The 90- and 180-day Lapsed and Dormant gates are fixed.

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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. This is what catches the faithful attender who quietly halves their involvement while still technically showing up — the heartbeat signal alone would miss them.

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The Neutral States

Yellow, Red, Orange, and Slate are the four statuses that appear in engagement alerts. Gray, White, and Green never raise an alert.
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.

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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 are what the baseline is computed from, which is why a brand-new person shows a White light until a few months of history exist.

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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. Two independent toggles are available:
  • Person Engagement — writes the engagement tier and warning light
  • Giving Engagement — writes the giving engagement classification
Parable creates and maintains its own tab and field definitions in Planning Center, and syncs run automatically after each calculation. Both toggles are off until you enable them.