As a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many faith-based organizations and churches have had to reduce capacity. If this sounds familiar, you’re probably looking for an easy way to limit the capacity for church services to comply with government mandates, follow recommendations from health care organizations and ultimately keep members safe. Online event registration can help churches and faith-based organizations.
In this article, we’ll explain how you can use Event Smart to manage your compliance with social-distancing guidelines and restrictions by limiting capacity for church services, facilitate contact tracing, and manage wait lists and attendance of your congregation in a few simple steps.
Limiting Capacity for Church During COVID-19
Until a vaccine for Covid-19 is widely available, it will remain advisable to continue to limit crowd sizes and also provide a safe way to gather while maintaining social distancing.
Best practices outlined in the guidelines suggest that church-service organizers should ensure that clergy, church staff, choir, attendees, and volunteers should follow social distancing to lessen their risk. This way, members can continue to worship safely while they properly distance themselves.
Here are some actionable tips on how to limit capacity for church services:
- Space out members by limiting them to every other row. Consider marking off spaces the appropriate distance (at least six feet) apart so it’s easy for attendees to find a place to sit. This way, attendees can distance themselves accordingly when they arrive.
- Set a definite church capacity. For example, if 250 people regularly attend church services, consider limiting it to 99 people in total.
- Seat the remaining people in another room such as a church hall or gymnasium. You might also consider holding services outdoors or via drive-up and stay in the parking lot.
For more information, check out the CDC guidelines for community faith-based organizations.
How to Limit Capacity for Church Services Using Event Smart
As a church-service organizer, you might have considered using an online event management solution to help you keep attendees organized. Event Smart can help you manage registrations, promote upcoming services, create waitlists, and so much more all online from one event website. Here is a great example:
Here’s how you can use Event Smart to create a website and limit capacity for church services:
#1: Create an Event Page
One of the first things you’ll want to do is create an event page for church services. This gives you a platform to share important details about each upcoming service with attendees. For example, you can post details about:
- Date and times of services (including multiple datetimes per event)
- Venue details and a map
- Contact information (of staff or volunteers)
- Important updates (for example, rescheduled services)
- Instructions for social distancing
- Registration guidelines
In addition to this, you can also use your event page to let attendees know if you plan on organizing online church services for people who can’t attend in-person.
Take a look at this event page for church services created using Event Smart:
Notice how they’ve shared the date and times, venue details, and a map for the church services in addition to registration guidelines for people who want to attend in-person. They’ve also shared a link to the Twitch channel where people can join online.
#2: Offer Online Registration
During regular circumstances, you might not consider requiring attendees to register for your church services.
However, during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic situation, offering online event registration options is an easy and effective way to limit the capacity for church services. For example, you can allow the first 99 people who register for church services to attend.
Using Event Smart, you can let members register for church services online from home. The platform lets you set up basic event registration forms to track attendance and contact people in case of emergencies. In addition to this, you can also transfer attendees across events. This is especially useful if someone would like to change their registration selection or if you need to move them to a different service.
Check out this demo church services event to see an event page with registration options.
#3: Track Attendance Requests
Another way to limit capacity for church services is by tracking attendance requests. It also makes it easy to keep track of who was in attendance and who wasn’t. For example, if someone registers for the upcoming church service and doesn’t end up attending, you can reach out to them to see if they’re okay or if they need any sort of help.
Event Smart offers and event app for scanning QR codes and barcodes for event check-in. This is the easiest (and fastest) way to track attendance requests for church services while ensuring attendees stay safe. The platform also lets you download an attendee list to see all of the people who registered for the church service.
#4: Manage Contact Tracing
Having a list of people who attended church service is good for contact tracing during COVID-19. You can use it to keep a record of people who might have been exposed.
For those unfamiliar, contact tracing is the process of identifying people who may have come into contact with an infected person and collecting further information about these contacts.
Event Smart helps church-service organizers create basic contact profiles and advanced contact profiles for all participants including clergy, church staff, choir, attendees, and volunteers. So, in case, you find out later that an attendee is experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, you’ll have a list of the people who attended church services the same time they did.
You can also use Event Smart’s contact tracing features to hold event registrations for review. This way, if a person who has been infected (or someone they’ve been in contact with) registers for a church service, you can reject their registration.
If you become aware of anyone that attended your place of worship that contracted the virus, you can send a batch email to everyone who also attended that service and may have therefore been exposed. Sending batch messages can be easily completed from the Messages area within Event Smart, by navigating to the event registrations and selecting all attendees. Once the attendees are selected, you can then click the button to send a batch message using a customized email template.
#5: Promote Your Event
Since people are required to socially distance themselves and fewer people are attending in-person church services, you need a way to get the word out about your church services. And an event website is perfect for that since it lets you promote the new way that members will learn about how you offer services during the pandemic.
If you have an audience on Facebook, you can add a Ticket Selector to your Facebook page. And, if you have an event website set up, you can embed the event list and event calendar to it to promote your church services.
#6: Create a Waitlist
Another way to effectively manage event registrations while limiting the capacity for church services is by creating a waitlist. This way, if someone cancels, another person can be allowed to attend. Plus, it gives people the option to register in advance and get their turn to attend.
To take things further, you can communicate the dates and times of future church services on your event page if you find that one service meets capacity.
To implement this on your Event Smart website, you can use the Waitlist Manager feature which lets you collect the name and email address of attendees that would like to join the waitlist. You can also set a limit for the number of people on your waitlist.
Conclusion
Event Smart helps church-service organizers rise to the challenge of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and safely organize church services while ensuring they’re able to keep churchgoers safe.
To recap, you can limit capacity for church services while making using Event Smart by:
- Creating an event page where people can get details about church services and guidelines.
- Offering online registration so those who want to attend in-person can register from home.
- Tracking attendance requests to keep a record of who was present and who wasn’t.
- Managing contact tracing to maintain a record of people who might have been exposed and keep others safe.
- Promoting your event to get the word out about church services and how people can register.
- Creating a waitlist to give everyone a chance to attend in-person.
Looking for an easy way to limit capacity for your church services? Try Event Smart today!
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