Stages, pipelines and funnels: which is which
The word pipeline appears on a dozen pages of this site and means more than one thing. The word stage is worse. If you have ever looked at two screens in Passport, seen two lists of stages, and wondered which one was real — this page is the answer. They are all real. They measure different things.
The two that matter
Every person in Passport carries two values at once, and neither substitutes for the other.
| Person type | Guest stage | |
|---|---|---|
| What it answers | What is this person to the church? | Where are they in their first few weeks? |
| Who sets it | Your rules, and your staff | Nobody — Passport derives it |
| Can it go backwards? | Not automatically. A downgrade is a manual admin decision | Yes, constantly. It is a description of right now |
| Values | Prospect, Visitor, Attendee, Member | Invited, Coming, First visit, Came back, Connected, plus the attention stages |
| Where you see it | A person's profile, the Visitor-Member Path | The Pipeline board in the Guests hub |
Both are always true.
:::note A worked example A woman came to your community BBQ, then planned a visit for Sunday, and has not arrived yet.
Her person type is Prospect — she has never attended a service. Her guest stage is Coming — she has an open visit plan.
Asked "what stage is she at?", both answers are correct. They are answers to different questions. :::
How they line up
This is the crosswalk. Read a row as "somebody at this point in the funnel is usually this type".
| Guest funnel stage | Person type | GoReach prospect stage |
|---|---|---|
| Invited | Prospect | New / Contacted |
| Coming | Prospect | Follow-up due / Follow-up overdue |
| First visit | Visitor | Converted |
| Came back | Visitor, becoming Attendee once your weeks threshold is met | Converted |
| Connected | Attendee or Member | Converted |
| (they have left the funnel) | Member | — |
| (they leave the funnel) | — | Declined |
Two things worth reading twice:
The funnel ends where the ladder keeps going. The guest funnel stops at Connected. The person type ladder carries on to Member. That is why you will never see "Attendee" on the Pipeline board and never see "Connected" on a profile — they belong to different lists.
GoReach "Converted" means they became a Visitor. Not a member, not a regular. Converting a prospect in GoReach is the act of recording that they finally came to a service, which is precisely what makes somebody a Visitor.
Where Reports fits
Reports does not add another list of stages. Its first section takes the people whose first visit fell in a period and counts how many have since come back and how many have connected to a group, a class or serving — the same milestones as two of the guest stages above.
The difference is time. The Pipeline board shows where everybody in progress stands right now; Reports follows one period's first-time guests for as long as it takes. Neither one is a person type.
Why the board is read-only
The Pipeline board looks like a kanban board and is not one. You cannot drag a card.
Every stage is derived from a recorded fact: somebody is at First visit because their attendance was recorded, and at Came back because it was recorded twice. If a name is stuck in a column, the thing that will move it is something happening in the world — a visit, a group join — not somebody's opinion in an app.
This is deliberate. A board you can drag is a board that tells you what your team believes about a guest. This one tells you what actually happened.
Next steps
- Glossary — every one of these terms, defined individually
- The Guests Hub — where the Pipeline board lives
- Visitor-Member Path — how to configure what each person type means at your church