How participation is counted

Why one person attending three activities is one beneficiary and three services, and what decides who counts.

Reporting to a funder usually needs two numbers that are easy to confuse: how many people you reached, and how much service you delivered. CommonLynk keeps them apart.

Two different questions

Unique beneficiaries counts people. Somebody who took part in three of your activities is one beneficiary.
Services counts occasions. That same person is three services.
Average services per person is the second divided by the first, and tells you how deeply you worked with people rather than how many you touched.

The three counting rules

Whether somebody counts as a beneficiary of an activity depends on what that kind of activity means. Every activity carries one of three rules.

Registered or received. Everyone enrolled counts, whether or not they were marked present. This is right for a distribution: if somebody collected a food parcel, they were reached.
Attended at least once. Someone counts if they were present or late for at least one session. This is right for a counselling service or a field visit.
Completed the activity. Only people who attended every session count. This is right for a training course, where attending one day out of five is not the outcome you promised.

Which rule your activity uses

You do not choose the rule directly. It is set from the activity type you picked at step one of the wizard, because the type already says what the activity is for.

Training, workshop and assessment count people who completed.
Counselling sessions and field visits count people who attended at least once.
Distributions, awareness sessions, meetings, community dialogues and information sessions count everyone registered.

Because the rule follows the activity type, choosing the right tile at step one is the single most important thing you do for your reported numbers. If your figures look wrong, check the activity type before anything else.

What counts as completed

Every time you save the attendance grid, CommonLynk works out afresh who completed the activity. A person is completed when there is a record for them in every single session, and every one of those records is present or late.

Late still counts as attending. Someone who arrived late was there.
Excused does not count as attending. An authorised absence is still an absence for the purpose of completing a course, and marking somebody excused will stop them counting as completed.
A session left blank for somebody counts against them in the same way as an absence, because completion means a full record, not merely no absences.
An activity with no sessions at all is left alone. A distribution that never opens a register keeps working, because its rule counts everyone registered anyway.

Enrolment and attendance are one record

CommonLynk does not keep a separate enrolment list beside the attendance record. When you add somebody to an activity, that same record notes that they were registered and on what date, and later carries whether they completed. One row, two facts.

This is why an enrolment figure and an attendance figure can never drift apart in CommonLynk, and why removing somebody from an activity removes both facts together.