It's vitally important that you mark down who has attended your sessions using the FA Events Platform. It gives you the peace of mind knowing that a certain number of players came and enjoyed some football, and it gives us the chance to use the simple data that you have captured and analyse trends of participation in football programmes across the country!
To mark someone down as attended or not attended on the FA Events Platform, the process could not be any easier. It's a quick and easy tick or cross and that's it.
You can record attendance for a session at its start, when it’s finished, and up to 14 days after it has taken place. The system will also give you a reminder in red text of when you can still take attendance if you haven't yet done so for a session before the two-week limit expires. Once 14 days have passed, attendance will not be able to be recorded for that session and this missed data will not be able to be gained back. The data will save and then you can crack on with planning that next session.
This video walks through the process of sharing a session. There is written guidance below if you prefer.
To record attendance, go straight to the 'Sessions' tab on the left side menu. You will land on 'Current Sessions' which will show all the upcoming sessions you have, but depending on if you are taking the attendance after the session has finished or even just one minute after it has started, you may need to switch to the 'Past Sessions' tab to find the correct one.
Click on the session you want to take attendance for, or alternatively, in the 'Taken Attendance' column, press the tick button - either of which should take you to that particular session. You can see that there are different colours of tick boxes:
- Green signals that attendance has been taken for at least one participant on the session
- Amber signals that attendance still needs to be taken for the session as it's still within the 14-day period
- Red signals that attendance can no longer be taken for that session because the 14-day period has expired
After choosing the right session, you will then land on the 'Details' tab at the top, but you need to flick to the 'Participants' tab instead. Here, you should see all the participants that have booked onto this session.
The left-sided participants are those on your 'Session Participant List' and those that you have marked as attended or non-attended for the session, whilst the names on the right are those on the 'Overall Participant List' who you haven't yet marked as attended or non-attended for the session. Ones in the 'Session Participant List' have booked the session, whilst ones in the 'Overall Participant List' haven't booked the session (but may have booked a previous or future session on your event).
If every name shows as being listed on the right-hand side in the 'Overall Participant List' when you view a session of yours, this means no one booked onto it directly. However, people from previous weeks can still attend - and to mark them on the register, they will move to the left-hand side 'Session Participant List' after you have clicked the plus sign next to their names.
Simply record the attendance using the either the tick box or plus sign next to each participant's name in the relevant list to mark if they turned up to the session or not. The numbers at the top of the screen will reflect what attendance you take.
When you tick, the box will fill in green for confirmation. When you click the plus sign, the person will transfer to the left-hand side of the screen instead and into your 'Session Participant List' with a green tick next to their name, meaning that you have marked them as attended for that session.
There is a red cross option too which will fill in red to confirm. For anyone you initially transferred over to the 'Session Participant List' who didn't actually attend, that participant would then move back into the right-hand side 'Overall Participant List'.
You will be able to tell that registers can't be taken in advance of a session by finding the 'Session Participant List' and 'Overall Participant List' on a session listed in the 'Current Sessions' tab. You will see that after clicking on a session here, there are no plus signs next to any participants' names, so you would have to wait until the session begins or ends to take your register in which the session would then move to your 'Past Sessions' tab anyway.
Once marked, the attendance will save itself on the FA Events Platform and the session you marked will turn green in the attendance column when you check your 'Past Sessions' again.
This is a key part of the process of running your provider, and likewise informs the County FA and the FA of the data you are collecting, so we would encourage everyone to record attendance on the day of the event, post-event or the following day. Remember the 14-day limit!