Skip to main content

Glossary

Every term Passport uses, defined once. If a page elsewhere on this site uses one of these words, this is what it means.

If you know the industry word​

Passport's vocabulary is not the vocabulary most church software uses. This table is the bridge.

If you would sayPassport calls it
Nurture sequence, drip campaignGuest Journeys
Assimilation, membership pathway, growth trackVisitor-Member Path
Second-time visitorthe Came back stage
At-risk member, churn riskat-risk alerts
First-time visitor follow-upthe Guests hub, Needs attention tab
Retention rate, back-door lossesReports, first section
Church CRM, people databasePeople
Door-to-door, canvassing, visitationGoReach
Volunteer schedulingServices

People​

Guest​

Anybody your church has met and has not yet connected. It spans both Prospects and Visitors, and it ends when somebody reaches Connected. It is a description, not a stored status — see Words Passport uses for the full definition.

Prospect​

Someone your team has met who has not yet attended a church service. Somebody who came to a community event, scanned a prospect card, filled in an ad lead form, or planned a visit they have not yet kept is still a Prospect.

Visitor​

Someone whose attendance at a church service has been recorded at least once. This is the whole definition, and it is enforced everywhere in Passport.

Group meetings, class sessions and community events do not make somebody a Visitor. They are bridges toward the service that does. If attending a barbecue made somebody a Visitor, your visitor count would stop describing anything, and the people who genuinely turned up on a Sunday would be lost among those who ate a burger in a park.

Attendee​

A Visitor who keeps turning up — present for a number of distinct weeks that your church sets, counting services, small groups and class sessions alike. Automatic promotion to Attendee is off by default.

Member​

Somebody who has met every membership criterion your church configured: a number of attendance weeks, plus whichever of water baptism, Holy Ghost infilling, a signed membership agreement and completed required classes you choose to require. Automatic promotion to Member is off by default.

Passport never demotes anybody automatically. A downgrade is always a manual admin decision.

Person type​

The membership ladder — Prospect, Visitor, Attendee, Member — plus Dropped. One of the two axes every person carries.

Guest stage​

The derived operational stage: Invited, Coming, First visit, Came back, Connected, plus the attention stages Missed a visit, Gone quiet, Stopped coming and Drifted away. Nobody sets it; Passport works it out from attendance, visit plans and connections. The other of the two axes.

Getting guests in​

Plan Your Visit​

Your church's public page where somebody picks a real upcoming service and tells you they are coming. Every church has exactly one, live from the day the church is created — there is no draft or publish step. See Plan Your Visit Page.

Visitor Connection Card​

The on-Sunday counterpart: a QR code on seat backs, the welcome desk or the bulletin that opens a short form on the guest's own phone. Plan Your Visit catches people before Sunday; the connection card catches them on it. See Visitor Connection Card.

Prospect Card​

A printed card with a QR code unique to the person who handed it out, so an outreach team can tell which conversations turned into visits. See Prospect Cards.

GoReach​

The outreach half of the product, and the name of Passport's entry plan: capturing prospects in the field, logging interactions against a map, and working follow-ups by hand. See Reach your community, and Plans for how GoReach compares with Companion, Plus and Pro.

Following up​

Guests hub​

The staff screen for working guests, with two tabs — Pipeline and Needs attention. See The Guests Hub.

Guest Funnel​

The road a live guest travels, from Invited through Came back to Connected. You see it live on the Pipeline board and work its stragglers from the Needs attention queue; Reports measures how many of a period's first-time guests get through it.

Guest Journeys​

Passport's ten automatic sequences of messages and tasks, anchored to what a guest actually did. The industry calls these nurture sequences. Steps run as a text, an email, a task for a person, or a staff alert — never a push notification. See Guest Journeys.

Care assignment​

A task Passport hands to a specific named person: prayer, a ride, practical help, a visit follow-up, class interest or general care. When a first-time visitor is recorded, Passport creates one automatically — "Personal follow-up within 48 hours".

Assignment is not round-robin. Passport walks four rungs — the person who already owns the relationship, then your per-category routing, then your church default, then the pastor — so a request is never left unowned. See Pastoral Care.

Visitor-Member Path​

The rules your church writes down for what each rung of the ladder means and when Passport should promote somebody. The industry word is assimilation. See Visitor-Member Path.

Measuring​

Engagement score​

A number from 0 to 100 on every person, higher being more engaged. It is a fixed formula, not a prediction and not AI: how recently they were here, how often they have been, and whether they are connected — a group, a class, a ministry, or a portal login.

Note that a portal login counts here but does not make somebody Connected on the guest board, which requires a group, a class or a ministry. The two are different measures.

A blank score means not yet calculated. It does not mean zero.

At-risk alerts​

Passport flags a member or attendee whose absence is long relative to their own history — not against a fixed number of weeks, so a monthly attender is not chased every Sunday. Staff see a phrase rather than a number: just slipping, overdue, well overdue, needs a check-in.

Each night Passport opens a care task for anybody newly flagged who has no open task. The Members at risk list shows that task — who has it, with Reassign, Claim, Complete and Cancel task — and offers Assign care only for people nobody holds a task for, so nobody is chased twice.

The person set as Who follows up in Settings → Staff alerts gets one email a week, on Tuesday morning, naming only the members flagged since the last one. Everyone else still on the list is a count. When nobody new has been flagged, nothing is sent.

Reports​

One page, Reports in the main navigation, that answers whether first-time guests come back, whether anyone reached them and where they came from, and — on the plans that include them — what outreach led to, who is drifting, how many people are coming, what decisions were made and how giving is going. See Reports.

Groups, classes, ministries​

Reusing the sentence that already separates them best:

A group is people who meet. A class is something you finish. A ministry is a job you do.

Joining any of the three is what makes somebody Connected, which is the moment they stop being a guest.

Next steps​