Glossary of Key Terms

Family - Typically refers to a nuclear household.

Involvement - A grouping of people. Each and every class, small group, and email list is an Involvement. Registration Forms are an optional attribute of an Involvement.

Meeting - A single gathering for an Involvement at a specific date and time.

People / Person - This is a the fundamental record in the database for each individual person. Every Person in the database has a People ID, which is the integer at the end of the URL of their profile.

Primary Adult - In most families, this would be the parents.

Regular Attender - Often used in the context of "members and regular attenders", this term is meaningless because there is currently no meaningfully thorough and objective method to distinguish who "regular attenders" actually are.

Related Family - When two families are related, such as adult siblings, they can be related to each other. When children become adults and are moved into their own families, they should be linked to their parents as related families.

Secondary Adult - Secondary adults are intended as dependent adults within the family. This could be a special needs child who has reached adult age, a senior parent being cared for by their child, or several other situations. In some cases, this can also be used for a nanny or other caretaker, or that can be a Related Family.

Status Flag - An indicator that a Person meets certain criteria. We use several dozen status flags, many for administrative purposes. On a Person profile, most of the colored boxes near the top of the profile are Status Flags. Status flags are updated nightly.