Pipeline, track, stage, step and role

GiftWell uses five words for how people grow and where you need them. They sit inside one another, so they are easy to mix up.

Word	What it is	In the demo
Pipeline	The whole thing: the tracks people grow along and the roles they grow into. A church has one.	The Pipeline menu: Roles and Tracks.
Track	One direction of growth, read left to right across every stage.	Belong, Become and Lead.
Stage	A column: a season of belonging that everyone on your list is in.	Attend, Connect, Serve and Train.
Step	One thing to do. Each step sits in one stage and grows one track.	Join a group; walk with someone; serve somewhere.
Role	A place you need people, and what it asks of them.	Small group leader, 6 of 10.

Track or pipeline?

A track is one row: Belong, or Become, or Lead. Each one has its own funnel on Tracks, with the step where people are stuck named in plain words.

The pipeline is never one track. It is all of them, plus the roles at the end. When someone asks "how is the leadership pipeline?", they mean the Lead track and the roles it fills: start from Roles.

Track or stage?

They cross. A stage is a column, a track is a row. Someone can be in the Serve stage and still have Become steps ahead of them. That is why a person has one stage but a next step in each track.

Where each word is set

• Stages, steps and tracks are arranged on Settings → Pathway. Each step there says which track it grows. An admin can rename the tracks, and the new names are used everywhere.
• Roles are added on Pipeline → Roles, each with what it asks of someone.

Where to go next

To set all of this up in your own church's words, read Fitting the pipeline to your church. To fill a role, open Roles: who is ready, who is growing, and who knows them. To see where people are stuck, open Tracks.