NEW! Gender Prediction
Today, I’m excited to announce one of many new features we have added to Clean My PCO recently. I think you’re going to love this.
Let’s Talk about Gender
When people create profiles in PCO, gender is one of those things that’s often overlooked or not prioritized.
I get it…you want to get them through the registration process, get kids into classrooms, and people to service. The less fields to complete, the better.
But gender is an important attribute. Most churches do things related to gender. Small groups, men’s and women’s nights, retreats, outings, gender themed parent/child events, etc.
If you’re in charge of your church’s database I bet you’ve received this e-mail: “Can you pull me a list of all active females?” Your answer is, “kind of” but since not all profiles have a gender assigned, the list is far from accurate.
We Fixed That
As part of the cleaning of your records, Clean My PCO now looks for profiles that don’t have a gender assigned and labels it as male or female.
How Does it Work?
Are you surprised to hear that there are companies that have built datasets around the gender of names? It’s true, and it works for international names as well. They know there’s an X% chance that [NAME] is a male or female. Clean My PCO taps into that data and reports that to you in the Clean My PCO tab.
We DO NOT change the gender in the person’s profile. You can tell PCO to do that if you would like. I’ll show you how further down.
We also do not check gender if the person already has the gender assigned in their profile. That would be silly, now, wouldn’t it?
Want to learn how to automatically change attender status? Check this out.
What You See
Go to your Clean My PCO custom tab in Planning Center and you’ll see these 2 fields at the bottom.
In the screenshot above, it is saying that we are 100% sure this person is a female. A name like “Pat” will have a much lower degree of confidence. You can decide where you become comfortable using the data. You may have a different degree of comfort for different applications.
Example: If you want to apply the gender to a person’s profile, you want the degree of confidence very high. If you’re sending an e-mail blast about a father/daughter event, it’s probably ok to send to people with a lower degree of confidence.
Practical Applications
Sounds great but how do you actually use it? I’m going to run through 2 applications.
1. Automatically assign the gender to the person’s profile
For this one, you want a super high degree of confidence. I want 98% or more. First, we make a list:
This list will show us everybody who is marked as Female in the Clean My PCO tab and degree of confidence is at least 98%. The 3rd rule is there just to keep your list from getting too long over time.
Make sure to share your list with the appropriate people and set auto refresh to nightly
Next, let’s create an automation on the list. This will automatically assign the gender on the profile to anybody on the list each day.
Next, make the same list and automation but change it to males.
That’s it. Now, PCO will assign the gender to the profile when we are at least 98% sure that the person is a certain gender. This will all happen in the background without any intervention from you. You can turn the degree of confidence up or down as you would like.
2. Make a list of all males or females using the Clean My PCO gender information
What if you’re wanting to send an e-mail or text blast to all males or all females? I suggest capturing the people who already have a gender set in their profile but also include some of this new gender data. Here’s how.
Let’s say you want all males between the ages of 18-35. Here’s what the list would look like:
I set the degree of confidence at 80%. To be honest, this is just my gut feeling. I don’t have any data to back up picking this number other than me spot checking the list and feeling good about what I saw. Since it’s probably not harming anything if a female gets an e-mail meant for males, you could probably go a little lower but I stuck with 80%.
Of course, you can add any number of other conditions you would like. Campus, marital status, people who have never checked into an event, etc.
From there, use the list to e-mail or text using whatever means you choose.
Run This for Your Whole Database
Over time, gender will fill in if you subscribe to our monthly plan. As profiles are added or changed, Clean My PCO will add gender information.
But what if you would like it applied to your entire database now? You can’t do it on your own but I can do it for you. If you have done a bulk cleaning with us in the past, I’m offering a special rate of 3 cents per record. If you have not done a bulk cleaning, reach out to me and we’ll get it started. This gender feature is part of all bulk cleanings going forward.