What Scout's statuses mean

A status pill is Scout's read on how connected someone is to the life of the church, based on what it can observe. This is what each word claims, what feeds it, and the thing it is most often mistaken for.

The ladder

| Status | What Scout is saying | |---|---| | New | Recently added and inside a grace period. Scout is not making a judgment yet. | | Connected | Participating across the areas Scout can see. | | Needs Attention | Participation has thinned against this person's own pattern. | | At Risk | Very little observable participation left. | | Inactive | Nothing Scout can see. |

There is also Settling, the pre-engagement tier for someone still arriving.

Thriving and Engaged are gone. They were both green, no pastor could tell them apart, and they collapsed into Connected. You may still see them stored on old records, where Scout folds them into Connected when it counts or sorts.

What feeds it

Scout scores five areas and weights them, then normalizes across only the areas a person is actually active in. Someone who has never given is not penalized for it; giving drops out of their calculation entirely.

• Serving (weight 30), over the last 13 weeks.
• Giving (weight 30), consistency over 6 months, with the pattern read over 12.
• Groups (weight 25), over the last 90 days.
• Connections (weight 15), over the last 8 weeks.
• Attendance (weight 15). This one is event check-ins over 13 weeks, not Sunday services, and it only affects people who have some.

The combined score lands on the ladder: 50 and above is Connected, 30 to 49 is Needs Attention, 1 to 29 is At Risk, and 0 is Inactive.

A young church is measured against itself

Scout does not hold a five-week-old church to a 13-week yardstick. The consistency windows clamp to how long your church has had observable signal, with floors of four weeks for serving and two months for giving, so week-one scores do not swing on a single data point.

The same restraint applies to flags. Scout will not say someone stopped serving until it has watched them serve for at least three weeks, and it will not call giving down until there are at least two lifetime gifts to compare against. Absence of data is never treated as evidence.

Practically, and for a brand-new church this is the number that governs: read the grace period below before you expect anything. The windows start producing real scores in your second month, and the statuses on top of them start meaning something in month three.

Someone new gets a grace period

Anyone whose record is less than 60 days old reads New, whatever their score says. It stops a genuine first-time visitor from being written off before anyone has met them.

It counts from when the record was created, not from any join date on it, so an import starts that clock for everybody it adds. A church that imported last week will see New across the whole directory for two months. That is the system refusing to judge people it has not watched, and it is why the read is worth acting on in month three rather than week four.

The sentence beside the pill

Scout writes two sentences of "why" next to a status. They name a behavior, a timeframe, and the person, and they compare that person to their own baseline rather than to anyone else.

They will not tell you why someone did what they did. Scout does not guess at motive, feeling, or trajectory, and it does not write you a script for the conversation. It points at what it saw and leaves the pastoring to you.

You can read the sentence without opening a profile: hover the pill in the Engagement column on the directory.

When it updates

A nightly batch is the only thing that writes a status. There is no recalculate button and no way to force a refresh, so a change you make today shows up tomorrow.

Who can see it

Statuses need View Scout's insights & engagement (view_intelligence). Without it, a profile reads "Scout is listening" and the engagement card shows no status at all.

View giving data matters here too, in a way that surprises people. Scout withholds its written observations entirely from anyone without it, rather than trying to edit giving out of a sentence. See What each permission controls.

Members never see any of this. There is no status, no score, and no read on themselves anywhere in churchHQ.

What you cannot change

The weights and the thresholds are the same for every church. There is no settings screen for tuning them, and no way to tell Scout that giving matters less at your church than groups do.

Next

• Working your list on the dashboard
• Reading a person's profile