Collie ethics
What Collie sees, and what it never does.
FlockConnect reads how connected the people in your church are. Collie, its assistant, drafts care notes and next steps from the same kinds of facts. A visit log is a memory aid. A reading about a person is something else: it says something about someone who never asked to be assessed. That deserves a straight answer, in plain words. What the reading is. Who can see it. What a member is and is not told. What Collie is and is not given. What your church should do with it. And what we will never do.
What the reading is, and what it is not
In a church whose Connection Health rules are set up, which signup tries to do for every new church by default and does not yet retry if that step fails, FlockConnect reads five things about each active person on the roster (never someone archived; the nightly sweep also passes over anyone marked inactive), on a nightly sweep that picks up where it left off and again when a care contact is logged, using only what your church has already recorded:
- Care contact. How recently someone on your care team logged a call, visit, or conversation with them.
- Attendance. How recently your church saw them at a gathering, counting a parent who checked a child in.
- Groups and teams. Whether they belong to a group or serve on a ministry team.
- Giving rhythm. When they, or another adult in their household, last gave, by date alone, never by amount, and only if your church has connected a giving source.
- Connections. How many people they are connected to. This ring reads nothing today; see below.
Each of those is a ring, and each ring is read against thresholds your church sets in Settings, such as "no care contact in 60 days", and comes out green, amber, or red, or unknown when there is nothing to read: the connections ring today, attendance or giving until a source is connected, and giving for a household with no recorded gift. On a person's page the rings are drawn as one wheel, and the word in its centre, Fully connected, Engaged, Developing, or At risk, comes from how full the rings are taken together. Church-wide lists group people by the weakest ring's word instead: Thriving, Engaged, Drifting, Disconnected, or Not enough data. No overall score or percentage is shown anywhere; beside each ring you see only what it measured, such as how many days since the last care contact.
Nothing about this is AI. It is arithmetic against your own thresholds, the same every time it runs. Collie is a separate thing. Its drafts are not built from the reading, though in chat it can look one up; more on that below.
The fifth ring, connections, reads nothing today. Nobody is scored on who their friends are. The relationship layer that will fill it is being built, and this page will say so when it is.
The reading is not a judgment about a person's faith, their intentions, or their worth. It is a description of what your church has seen, and has not seen, lately. Each person is read against the same thresholds; nobody is ranked against anyone else. Each reading is stored, and the product shows the latest one. The reading is computed for churches on every plan, Starter included, not only the Collie plans; a Starter church is not shown it, and the rings appear with the Collie plans, which begin with the Collie Small plan.
A word we are retiring
Decided 2026-09-08. Being built.
One of those words describes the person rather than what the church saw. "Drifting" says what someone is doing. We decided that a label on a person must describe what the church observed, and we are retiring it, along with "At risk", the word the wheel shows when the rings are emptiest. The replacement is a plain observation: "we haven't seen them in nine weeks." The rename is being built. Until it ships, the old words are still on screen, and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
The reason is one an AI evaluator put to us when it read our site: a flag that says "drifting" can quietly become a judgment about someone. It was right.
Connections, and the map, as they are being built
The fifth ring will read connections. A connection in FlockConnect is one person's word that they feel connected to another. Today a staff member can record one on a profile, on the Collie plans, and the record keeps who entered it; the care report's and the member form's answers to "who do you feel connected to?" are kept where they were given. The decided design, being built, goes further: a connection will point one way, keep who said it and how they were asked, never be written on anyone's behalf, and the person named will never be told. Sharing a group or a household is not a connection and will never be counted as one. As that layer is built, a member who is asked will be told, on the question itself, what happens to the answer. The view that draws connections is being built for the Collie plans.
A map of where your church lives is being built for the Collie plans too. Once it is built, it is opened only by the people who can already see every address, every group, and every care assignment: the account owner, or an admin holding all three. Never a care partner, never a member. A person will be able to be kept off the map at the source, and from that moment their address is never placed at all.
Who inside your church can see it
The account owner, and admins who hold access to people: a Full Admin, a Care Admin, or a People/Data Admin.
Care partners cannot see it at all. Not the word, not the rings. This is not a setting anyone can change; the database refuses the rows. A care partner sees a card for each person assigned to them (name, photo, contact details, birthday, their own log entries, reports and follow-ups, and the quick-log to add to them) and nothing else.
The giving ring is narrower still. Only the account owner can grant giving rhythm to someone already on your team, after a fresh verification code, and the database enforces that rule. One door is wider than that today, and we would rather say so: an admin who already sees giving rhythm can invite a new admin with it. We have logged that gap to close. Care partners can never see it under any grant. Every permission change is written to your church's log.
The uncomfortable part, said plainly: the roles that can see the reading see it for the whole church, not only for the people they are responsible for. If that is wider than you want, the answer today is to give fewer people those roles.
Can a member see it? Can they decline?
No, and no. Members never log in to FlockConnect, so nothing shows a member their own reading, and nobody is told they have one. There is no button a member can press to opt out of being read. The one exception is a staff member who is also on the roster: an owner or an admin with access to people can open their own profile like any other and see what the church sees, while a care partner on the roster sees only their own card.
We are not going to route around that. The objection is real: these are people who never agreed to be assessed. Our answer is that your church agreed on their behalf, and that this is not new. Churches have always kept pastoral records: who is sick, who has stopped coming, who needs a visit. The software did not create that relationship, and it does not change who is accountable for it. Your church is.
So we commit to your church, not to your members, and we hand you the words to keep faith with them. If you want to tell your congregation, here is a passage you may use as it is:
Our pastors and care team use software to help us notice when someone has not been seen for a while. It counts what our church already records: whether you have been to a gathering, whether you are in a group, whether someone from the care team has been in touch, and when your household last gave, never how much. It does not decide anything about anyone; a person on our care team does, and nobody is ever contacted because of what it noticed unless one of us chooses to reach out. It exists so that nobody drifts away from this church unnoticed. If you would rather talk about this, come and find one of us.
What Collie is given, what it is not, and what crosses to an AI provider
Collie's drafts are not built from the reading. When Collie writes a care snapshot about a person, it is given the same kinds of facts the reading is built from, and it forms its own one-line read of how connected the person seems, using the same five words. A care plan, an outreach email, or a handoff note about that person forms no read of its own: where an approved snapshot exists, the outreach email and the handoff note reuse its word, and the care plan reuses its reasoning. In chat it is different: when you ask Collie about one person, it can look up that person's latest reading, the word and the ring outcomes without the giving ring, and answer you with them. Either way, what comes back is a draft or an answer to you. A person reviews a draft, edits it where needed, and approves it before anything happens. Collie never sends a message, never writes to a connected system, and never decides who needs care.
When Collie drafts, some of your church's data goes to an AI provider, and here is exactly what. Before anything leaves our servers, member names are replaced with neutral labels, and a check refuses the request outright if an email address or phone number is present. The replacement has known gaps, and we would rather name them: a very short or very common first name of someone else mentioned in passing can slip through as a plain word; a name a care partner speaks that belongs to someone outside the people assigned to them is not recognized and goes as spoken; a name typed into an Extra info field that matches nobody in your church stays as typed; and an email address or phone number typed into an Extra info field is stripped out rather than stopping the request. For a care snapshot, the provider receives: whether the person is a newcomer and whether they are active, how long since the last care contact, how many follow-ups are open and overdue, the status of the latest care report, how many people share their household and how many groups and teams they are in, a dated list of recent contact kinds and follow-up titles, and any Extra info fields your church has switched on for Collie. It does not receive who the person is, and it does not receive the words your team wrote in a care log entry; those are never sent. Every other kind of draft is built from the same kinds of material: neutral labels and opaque record identifiers in place of people, dates, counts, and the titles your team gave follow-ups and reminders; never the words of a care log entry.
Your own words also cross, and we will not hide them. Anything you type to Collie in chat. A quick note a care partner dictates to Collie, so Collie can turn the words into a log entry for the partner to confirm. A care request a member wrote on a form, when your team asks Collie to sort it. The short instructions your team types when asking for an outreach email or a handoff note. And the names and descriptions your church itself gave things: a group's name, a form's title, the answers you gave about your church when you set it up, the column headers of a file you import. Names are replaced the same way wherever the replacement can see them, with the gaps named above; a person's name your church put inside a group's or a form's own title, like Maria's Group, goes as your church named it. Every request travels through a gateway under zero-data-retention terms, so the provider does not keep or train on what it receives. We do not claim that sensitive data can never reach Collie. We claim to tell you, in plain words, the kinds of text that can, and to keep this page current as Collie learns new kinds of help.
What your church should do with a reading, and what it must never do
Do
- Treat it as a question, not a verdict.
- Open the person and read the evidence under the rings before you conclude anything.
- Send a person, not a message: a call, a visit, a word after the service.
- Log what you learn, so the next reading is truer than this one.
- Read "Not enough data" as "nobody can see this person yet", not as a concern.
Never
- Never show a person their own reading.
- Never raise a reading in a membership, leadership, or discipline decision.
- Never let a reading decide who gets a visit and who does not. Let it order your attention; let a pastor decide.
- Never pass a reading to someone with no pastoral reason to know it.
What FlockConnect will never do
Recorded as standing decisions on 2026-09-09; the fourth was added on 2026-09-13.
These are not settings. They are how the product is built, and this page is where we are held to them.
- Nothing Collie drafts, and nothing prompted by a reading, reaches a member without a person reviewing and approving it. This has been true from the first day.
- The reading is never an input to eligibility. It never gates membership, leadership, group placement, serving, or any benefit, in FlockConnect or in anything FlockConnect writes to a connected system.
- The reading is never used to compare or benchmark one church's people against another's. Your readings are your church's own, and they are in nobody's league table.
- FlockConnect never pulls public data about a person. It reads only what your church records itself and what your connected church system holds: no credit data, no public records, nothing bought or scraped.
Why it flags instead of deciding: the research underneath
The idea behind the reading is old and small. In 1984, Win and Charles Arn published a comparison of 100 people who had joined a church: 50 still active six months later and 50 who had dropped out. Nearly everyone who stayed named six or more friends inside the congregation; nearly everyone who left named fewer, and more than half named one or two. Flavil Yeakley, whose work the Arns cited, is often credited for that table. In their own article the Arns credit him for a different finding and attribute the friendship table to no one.
That is what the reading rests on: 100 people, in a pastoral magazine, forty years ago. The friend counts were self-reported, and the people who had left were asked to remember friendships after they had gone. Most of all, it is correlational. Friendships may keep people, or people already on their way out may let friendships go first. The study cannot say which.
We think the finding is right in its shape: there is a floor below which people leave without a word, and a band above which they stay. But the evidence is old, small, and correlational, and that is exactly why the product flags rather than decides, and why a person makes every call. A reading built on that research has no business deciding anything about anyone. It has every business asking a pastor to look.
Short answers
- What does FlockConnect's connection reading measure?
- Five rings, from what your church already records: care contact, attendance, groups and teams, giving rhythm by date only, and connections, which reads nothing today. Each is compared against thresholds your church sets. A person's page shows one word for the rings taken together; church-wide lists group people by the weakest ring's word.
- Is the connection reading AI?
- No. It is arithmetic against your church's thresholds, recomputed on a nightly sweep. Collie, the assistant, does not build its drafts from the reading; its care snapshot forms its own read from the same kinds of facts, and the other drafts form none of their own. In chat it can look up a person's latest reading when you ask about them. Everything it drafts waits for a person's approval.
- Who can see a person's connection reading?
- The account owner and admins with access to people, for the whole church. Care partners cannot see it at all, and the database enforces that. Only the account owner can grant the giving ring to someone already on the team; an admin who has it can pass it on when inviting a new admin, a gap we have logged to close.
- Can a church member see their own reading or opt out?
- No. Members never log in, nothing shows a member their reading, and there is no member opt-out. The commitment is to the church, and the page gives churches words to tell their congregation.
- Does Collie decide who needs care?
- No. Collie drafts; a person reviews and approves every draft before anything happens, and nothing Collie drafts reaches a member without that approval. The reading is never an input to membership, leadership, group placement, serving, or benefits.
How FlockConnect protects the data behind the reading is on the trust and security page. The plain-language tour of privacy and data safety is in the help center.
Care for people, not numbers.
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