Attendance Bias
The systematic over- or under-count in attendance figures — and the adjustment that corrects it.
Attendance bias is the systematic tendency of an attendance count to run consistently high or low relative to the true number of people in the room. It is not random noise — it is a repeatable skew in one direction, and it shows up in every counting method. A volunteer headcount tends to drift high; a clicker misses late arrivals; a camera's view can be blocked by a pillar or balcony overhang, cut off at the edge of its field of view, double-count at a second entrance, or miss a hidden seating area entirely. Left unmeasured, the bias compounds — every trend built on a skewed count inherits the skew.
Kingdom Metrics corrects for it with a per-camera bias adjustment — for example, +8% if a sensor consistently misses a balcony section that holds about 8% of the congregation. The adjustment is applied after the AI count and before the number is stored as the official attendance record, so the figure you see already accounts for what the camera cannot.
Why it matters for your church: no counting method is perfectly unbiased — but an unmeasured bias is the dangerous one. Naming it, and correcting it with a calibrated adjustment, bridges the gap between what is counted and what is true. The result is an attendance number your team can trust: more accurate than a raw volunteer headcount, and consistent enough week-over-week to produce reliable trends.