How to Drown Out the Noise to Reach Real People
Does your church take attendance regularly in-house? How about reviewing insights on socials like Instagram or Facebook? Is your media team obsessed with YouTube view counts? Data is everywhere, but insight is rare. We collect and review all this data, but do we know what we’re looking for? Sure, we shouldn’t focus on the vanity of boosting our “core” numbers like viewers and attendees, but these metrics do give us clues as to how we can serve our physical and digital communities better!
Metrics are the operational vitals of your church. They help identify health issues, spot potential red flags, and prioritize areas for growth. While companies generally use metric data (called KPIs or Key Performance Indicators) to generate more sales, churches can use metrics to maximize impact and serve real people in meaningful ways. Here are 3 KPIs your church can focus on (and ideas as to how you can take action on them).
Guest Follow-Up & Retention Rate
When someone takes the time to fill out a connection card, they are opening the door to engage with or become involved in your church’s community in some way (even if it’s just to give a gift). The way we honor that as a church is by following up with every single individual who shared their contact information. Whether it’s to give them next steps or simply say thank you, that first contact matters. Your goal is to ensure follow-up happens, as well as evaluate its effectiveness.
One way to track this is to find out what percentage of your guests are followed up with within 48 hours, as well as how many engage back in some way (email/SMS reply, reaching out to a member for more info, responding to your CTA, returning to your service within 2 weeks, etc.). Following up with 100% of your guests should always be the goal. But not every guest will engage…and that’s okay.
If less than 10% of your first-time guests engage with you, perhaps try another method of contact or communication. You can even adjust your outreach based on demographics (i.e, most contacts who are millennials and below prefer SMS outreach compared to phone calls). Taking the time to measure this important stat and take action on it can be the difference between keeping visitors in and being a revolving door.
Small Group Participation Rate
This can be measured in different ways: ratio of regular service attendees to small group members, percentage of small group members who regularly attend meetings, or even how many small group members are engaged beyond attendance. Each of these examples has a benefit. Let’s break them down.
- Participation Ratio: If fewer than 1 out of 3 regular attendees are also group members, your promotion or structure may need a revamp.
- Group Attendance: Less than 50% attendance may point to leadership gaps or issues with group size.
- Discipleship Outcomes: If 30% of group members are engaging beyond attendance (baptism, prayer request, serving), you’re on the right track.
Member Discipleship/Mentorship Count
While this can become challenging to track, a core part of our mission as a church is to make disciples. This is how we suggest measuring it: when adding and managing your contacts within your ChMS (church management system, i.e., Planning Center People), keep custom tags to track who is actively in a small group, serving on a team (assuming team members are receiving some level of care), receiving counseling, or getting some level of 1:1 mentorship.
The goal isn’t to admire how many people are being discipled; it’s to identify who isn’t. If they aren’t receiving any discipleship, you want to know so you can guide (not forcefully, of course) them towards these opportunities and ensure they know what is available to them if they decide to engage. We’d recommend having volunteers check in on guests and members to show them some love and care until they take that next step. This kind of intentional care builds trust and creates pathways for growth.
The function of the church isn’t to manage people, but it is to manage culture. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. The better we work towards measuring these metrics, the better we can manage the culture of our church community and be the lighthouse Jesus called us to be.
If your church needs help identifying metrics that move people (and not just numbers), visit getignitd.com and hit the Let’s Talk button on the homepage!