Words Passport uses
Passport uses a small number of words very precisely, and most of the confusion people have with the product is really confusion about one of them.
This section is the reference for those words. Everything else on this site is written assuming them.
In this section
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Glossary | Every Passport term, defined once, with the industry word it corresponds to |
| Stages, pipelines and funnels | The four different things Passport calls a "stage", and how they line up |
Guest
The most-used word on this site, and the one that has never been written down.
A guest is anybody your church has met and has not yet connected.
It is not a person type and it is not a field anybody sets. It spans two person types — Prospects, who have not attended a service, and Visitors, who have — and it ends at a specific, recorded moment: somebody stops being a guest when they reach Connected, which means they have joined a group, a class or a ministry.
Producing that moment is what the whole guest funnel is for.
Three things follow from this, and they are the ones people get wrong:
- "First-time guest" means a Visitor. They have attended once. The phrase is about how recently they arrived, not about whether they have been.
- A guest is not necessarily a Visitor. Somebody who filled in your Visit Page and has not turned up yet is a guest and a Prospect. Both are true at once.
- Somebody who drifts away after being connected is not a guest again. They are a connected person who needs winning back, and Passport works them through the same Needs attention queue without demoting them.
:::note Nobody is ever "changed to Guest" There is no such setting, because guest is a description rather than a status. What Passport actually stores is a person type and a derived stage — see Stages, pipelines and funnels. :::
Why this section exists
These words were defined in five different places on this site before this page existed, and the definitions were consistent but scattered — so whichever one you happened to land on was the one you got, and pages that assumed the distinction never restated it.
They are defined here now. The pages that need them link here rather than explaining again.
Next steps
- Read the Glossary for every term in one place
- Read Stages, pipelines and funnels if you have seen two different stage lists and want to know how they relate
- Read How Passport Fits Together for the shape of the product itself