5 hidden metrics to help your church track outreach, assimilation, and connection

Worship attendance and weekly giving are obvious metrics every church uses to evaluate health and growth.  But, there are a series of activities underlying these numbers that actually drive them.  These include: outreach, follow-up, equipping, groups, and serving.

We offer a Meet The Software Zoom webinar every week using the image below to illustrate what the outreach, assimilation, and connection process looks like.  Some churches are very intentional in their process, others are more "organic" in how they accomplish these objectives.

Gray is for outreach, orange for assimilation, and blue for connection.  Each circle (group) represents an activity associated with that part of the process. 

In the webinar we talk about how Churchteams helps churches navigate each part of this process using a single software solution.  In our work with the entire process, we are able to discover 5 hidden metrics that churches often already have that they can use as indicators to track their discipleship process across the spectrum.

1.  Outreach - Combine new website registrations (ex. more information, prepare your visit, prayer), new livestream ip addresses, targetted outreach event registrations (ex. VBS, Youth, Recovery), and service project contacts into a single number.  
2. Follow-up - Some churches distinguish between 1st and 2nd time guests.  Others consider people guests until they've attended 3 times.  After that they are considered regular attenders.  Capturing this information can be a challenge and is usually done with Connection Cards and/or ushers counting.  Some churches have found All Check with Text-to-Church really helpful for this.  
3. Equipping - These activities include # of baptisms, new members, and regular attenders of discipleship classes.
4. Groups - Sunday School or Bible Study classes are relatively easy to capture weekly attendance that can be averaged over a month.  Home groups can be a little more challenging.  We suggest using our automated meeting reports and then adding up average attendance per group over a month since many of these groups don't meet weekly.
5. Serving - Attendance for serving can be done using All Check, or by our automated attendance feature for those who've accepted the invitation to serve.

Many churches will track weekly groups and serving alongside weekly worship and giving.  But, we find that because outreach, follow-up, equipping, and often groups are not weekly activities; tracking a church's connection process is best done on a monthly basis.   

Over decades of working alongside church leaders and engaging with ministry data, we’ve noticed that, so often, the most valuable information is hidden in plain sight. Many churches get used to viewing their data from just one angle—or sometimes stop tracking it at all—without realizing that the real story of their ministry is already right there, waiting to be seen in the data they already have.

If you are a Churchteams client and interested in being part of a small group of church leaders working on getting more out of your data, reply to this email or boyd@churchteams.com.  If there is enough interest I will set up a pilot group using Zoom for us to collaborate on building out and further refining these metrics.