Ok, its been a week since I mentioned showing the Arena Person Detail page. As promised here’s a screenshot of a Person Detail screen. This page shows just about everything we know about a particular person.
When designing this page, we wanted it to..
- show all pertinent data for a person in one place without requiring the user to tab through several different screens
- be intuitive so that users can easily update information
- not waste space with fields that have no values entered
- have it be customizable so that its easy to add new fields
To that end, very little on this page is hard-coded. Arena uses a concept called “Person Attributes” which are defined through the Administrative area of Arena. Person Attributes allow you to define an unlimited amount of information that you want to collect about each person. For each attribute, you decide if it is a date, integer, decimal, currency, string, boolean, or even a table lookup, if it is read-only, or always required. Once you’ve defined the attributes, you group them into attribute groups and define where on the Person Detail screen you’d like them displayed. You can also set security on each attribute and/or attribute group to restrict access.
The person attribute groups that we use at CCV are: Check-In, Education, Employment, Sports, VolunteerProfile, Member Security, and Member Status.
Whether its a person attribute group, or any other section on the Person Detail page, we also only display fields that have a value entered. This cuts down on the information overload that would occur if we displayed every field.
For example, our Member Status attribute group includes nine different attributes, but we only see Baptism Date listed for Jared. If we click the ‘edit’ link for this group, then we’ll see all the available attributes. 
If we enter any additional values for any of the other attributes, then they’ll be displayed after saving the info.
Now for the details. I won’t describe each section entirely as I hope some of this is self-explanatory.
Personal Information:
This is not an attribute group so these fields will always be present. The Person ID is Arena’s unique identifier for each person, while the Foreign ID can be used to link to another system. We’re syncing to Shelby v5.0 for contributions (we’re in the middle of writing a new Arena contributions application).
The Date Last Verified field is a way to “touch” a record to indicate that you know the information is correct at a particular time.
Emails:
An unlimited number of emails can be entered along with a short description and a flag indicating if its active or not. Arena will then sent any communications for this person to all their active emails. There is also a component of Arena that can monitor your mail server for returned emails (hard bounces) and then automatically update any occurrence of the bad email in Arena to be inactive and include a note about why it was inactivated.
Phones & Addresses:
The list of available phone and address types is defined through the Arena administrative interface, and is unlimited.
Activity:
The meter level is a field on the person record that is used to indicate a persons involvement. At CCV we look at things like when the record was last modified, when they last contributed, are they serving, are they in a small group, when did they last attend a service or event, etc. There is a nightly process that evaluates all of these factors and assigns a point score (0-100). Arena then keeps a history of any changes to this indicator so we can report on increasing or declining indicators.
Small Group Information, Team Information, Youth Group Information, etc:
Arena can be configured to have any number of small group “categories”. Involvement in each of the different categories is displayed here. So what’s a small group category? That’s a topic for another day, but lets just say its extremely configurable. Enough so that we actually use the small group architecture for both our Small Group ministry which is geographically based and uses a very advanced registration process and for our sports ministry which requires team scheduling and scoring results.
Events, Serving Tags, Ministry Tags:
“Tags” will also be topic for another day, but essentially tags are hierarchal collections of individuals. This area displays all the tags that a person has been a member of.
Recent Attendance:
Lists the most recent occurrences that the person has attended
Attendance Rate:
There are specific attendance types that are configured as weekend services. This chart displays a persons attendance rate in any of those attendance types. Its a quick way to tell how often a person may be attending on the weekends.
Notes:
An area that any number of notes, comments, etc can be entered for a person. These notes can be private so that only the user entering them will see them. They can also be flagged to display at the top of the screen and to display on a check-in kiosk if the person checks into any event or service.
History:
Arena tracks all changes to the record, all communications, all activity, and even when the person logs into the public website. My screenshot shows all the history, but by default this history is not displayed until user actually selects to display it.
Hope that is a good introduction to one of the most heavily used screens in Arena. Feel free to comment with any questions or areas that you’d like me to go into more detail.
- David
