Name: Measuring the Metrics that Actually Matter
Uploaded: 2024-09-16T15:00:02.095Z
Duration: 34 min 4 s
Description: Measuring the Metrics that Actually Matter

Transcript for "Measuring the Metrics that Actually Matter": Alright. Hold on. Yeah. Not sure if anybody has joined me or not. If you have, put in the chat that I'm here and where you're from. We'll be here momentarily. Just trying to make sure that everyone is available. It looks like there's some challenges with some of us joining. Again, you wanna put something in the chat. Notice looks like there'll be some challenges for them. Alright. We get a notification here. Here we go. Thank you guys for joining me. I would love to share a a little bit about how I can contribute to, this revival that is taking place. For those of you that do not know who I am, my name is Salome Adair. A little bit about me on the screen, is that I am the lead pastor of Inspire Interfaith Church, here in Arlington, Texas. I've been preaching since I was 16 years old. I'm actually a former educator, and have been married for 90 years to my high school sweetheart, and I love playing basketball, and I got moves, which means I I love dancing. And so what I wanna talk to you about today, as I just let you know a little bit about me is my assignment is talking about measuring the metrics that matter, emphasizing the metrics that matter. And the question I wanna ask a few of you if you wanna put in the chat, and send a couple messages, to me is, first question is, how did they know that Jesus fed 5,000 people? How did they know? Alright. If anybody wants to put in the chat, their response to that, that would second question, while you're working on the first one, is how do they know there were 3,000 souls added to the kingdom on the day of Pentecost? Okay. I have Chris saying they counted them. Exactly. Exactly. They counted them. And so what we have taken place throughout all scripture is that there was an awareness or a inventory of metrics. I know that for some people, we feel that measuring things or using numbers or accounting things can be ungodly at times. And I I I I do want to, give a concession that not all metrics, are the end all, be all, but they do have a value for the kingdom work we get to do. And so today, I want to talk to you about 7 metrics. There's a lot that we could talk about, but I want to talk about 7 metrics that I think every church should focus on and make sure that they give great attention to that I think will impact the church and ensure that that church is healthy. Alright. That first metric I wanna talk about is the number of first time guests. As you look, on your screen, you'll see that, there's a couple of things that that I've written here for you to think through. Stable churches, there's a report, and I'll give you the the references at the end of this presentation, but stable churches have at least 3 top 3 first time guests every single week. Growing churches have at least 5 first time guests every single week. So when we're looking at this metric, the first question we're going to ask ourselves for our own church every week, How many first time guests did we have this week? Alright. This is one of the drivers, of a healthy church is new people coming to the church. So then we look at, well, how do we track that? What are the things we're doing to really evaluate? Are we a church that's meeting at least the stable threshold? Or are we a growing church, which means we're a church that's moving in a healthy direction, which means we got at least 5 first time guests every single week. The first, way you track this is by your weekly invitations. Now everyone has different ways you evangelize. Some of the ways we evangelize at Inspire to Live Church is that we personally go out and invite people, to church. We have that that is a cultural thing for our churches that every one of us that have the Andrew mentality. Let's bring somebody to church. Let's bring somebody close to Jesus. And so, you you're looking at how your leaders and your service teams and and people in general are weekly inviting, people, to, your church. Then you're looking at your first time guest cards. If you don't notice, we're probably going to drop in all these sessions. We're going to name drop ministry brands and amplify because it is a great system that helps you keep track of these things. And the first time guest card, whether it's paper that you put into the system or it's electronic, which the forms are capable for that, you utilize those first time guest cards to be able to track how many people do we have coming every single week. Another way you do that is tracking the number of first time givers. Again, Ministry Brands Amplify, has platforms. If you're utilizing their text to give and and their online connections, you can track first time givers, that come, to your church. Alright. So one of the metrics that you gotta measure if you're gonna be a healthy church is how many first time guests you have coming. The second met, measurement that you want to a metric you wanna measure is the number of guests becoming members. Now you must understand we do a lot of work to get a first time guest. Now we have to steward what God has blessed us with. When some God allows somebody to come into our, church for the first time, it's not enough to say, how are you doing? We're so glad you're here. We have to do the follow-up. Here's the reality. The average church experiences 10 to 15% attrition every single year. Alright? The good church is closer to 10%. An unhealthy church may be over 15% of the people that are not coming back to your church, every single year. So a church that is growing knows this. We have to grow by 20% at every single year in our first in our for in our member retention and in our guests and all these metrics in order to make sure that we're a healthy church that's gonna sustain long term versus being a church that is that eventually will start to die. So the question you ask yourself, the question the leadership team should ask their self, how many guests have become members of the church? So first, we're looking at how many guests do we have coming to the church. That's attraction. Then we're looking at how many guests are becoming members. That's keeping. That's retention. So we want we we already did the hard work of sowing the seeds and letting people know that we're here. Now we got to do the diligent work of making sure that they move from guests to regular attender to eventually a member in our church. Alright. Now I'm momentarily, I'll continue to check, the the chat. So if you have a question for me, don't hesitate, to reach out to me. And if you wanna just say, hey, man. That's a good point. Let me know that as well. So the next thing we want as a metric to focus on as a church and figure out how to be effective with, is now well, I'm sorry. How do we track, guests to become members? You have to have a guest assimilation system. We use utilize our guest assimilation system through, Amplify, and we we have a their workflow, the capturing of first time guest information, and being able to ensure that we have touch points for the 1st 6 weeks. For sure, the 1st 6 weeks, we have touch points with every single guest. I personally, because of the system, get notifications of every first time guest and their information. I call them every at the beginning of every week, I call them whether it's 10 guests or whether it's 21st time guests. I call them, and then my team continues to help facilitate that so that we can make sure that they know we care about them not just because they came, but we also are gonna walk with them every step of the way. And then you've got to have first time guest surveys. You need to know why people are coming to your church. You need to know what they're looking for. I know, by our metrics that 45% of the people that come to our church are looking for a church home. This is important information because now that helps me understand that we have 40 almost half of the people that come, they're looking for a church home. What I also know is that the number one two main reasons that they want a church home and what they're looking for at a church home is a place where there is biblical teaching and where they can grow spiritually. If you don't have metrics to be able to obtain that information, you don't know why somebody came that that there that day, which puts you at a disadvantage at doing the kingdom work. Alright? And so now the next thing I wanna talk about that you've got to have strong measurements around this metric is the number of volunteers. Every believer you have to be convinced that every believer has been called to serve and use their gift for the glory of God. We know by some of the, studies that healthy churches, have at least 57% of their church actively serving. We also know that a part of retaining members is getting them involved both in life groups and both, in service teams. So the question you're always asking yourself, how many members served at least once this week or month? How many members have been actively involved in helping expand the kingdom? Huge question that you got to ask yourself. Now how do we track this? Just like we got a guest assimilation system, we got to have a membership assimilation system. We have to have a membership, team. We call it our Stay Connected team at Inspire to Live Church. We take and utilize the platforms that are available to us to take attendance so that within our service teams, we're taking attendance so that the leaders know if their people have been involved, if they have been serving, if they have signed up through, the the planning that is involved, within Amplify. We we look at the number of new members that are serving for the first time. We celebrate people that, start serving. So all those numbers, along with the leaders that report and share those celebrations, helps us keep track of the volunteers in the army that the Lord has given us, to to steward to accomplish the mission of God. Right? Next, we wanna look at a metric of the number of people we're developing. So so, again, I hope you're seeing this progression, that is taking place here. We're going from attracting people and being first time guests, to our church to then being great at stewarding them that eventually those, we have a high percentage of them joining our church. But once they join our church, we also want to move them to be active in serving. Life groups, I'll come to that a little bit later. But then, here's the reality. You're only as strong of a church as you develop people. Jesus spent time developing his leaders. He discipled them and developed them. My main focus here is development. What do I mean by that? When he sent them out 2 by 2, he was preparing them to take a more important role down the road. And we have to develop our volunteers because not everybody comes with understanding how to do ministry. We if you want to have a healthy church, if you want to have a thriving church, you have to give the volunteer staff the opportunity to grow and really capture the mission and vision of God. So the question you're asking is how many people did we develop this week? Now the great thing about this, you're not developing people as the leader if you're the leader of the church by yourself, but this is done in collaboration of all the leaders that are a part of the church. How are we developing people? Here's a couple ways we track whether or not we're effectively developing people. 1, our ministry huddle attendance. I think it's so critical that every week or regularly, each ministry has a 15 minute huddle huddle where they're taking time to inspire one another, inform one another, intercede for one another. They're getting the opportunity to be, involved with learning the culture of the church, and you're able to, in those many pockets, continue to push the vision. Not only that, you gotta have general assembly meetings. I know many of us have our general assembly meetings maybe once a year. I think you should do that way more often at men minimum once a month where you bring as many people as you can together, continue to share share the vision, continue to to to to to develop the areas that we're struggling in, and continue to help us learn how to manage ourself and how to manage those that God has blessed us to lead. Coaching and observations. I like to personally sit while one of my leaders does their monthly meeting or where one of my leaders are doing one of their huddles, and I wanna learn from them, and I also wanna be able to observe some of the great things they're doing and opportunities of growth. There's an old phrase that I've been using for years. I don't know where I got it from, but it says don't expect what you don't inspect. And so I know there has to be an environment of coaching, but not only for me as a lead lead a lead leader, if you will, but also my leadership coach other leaders. They should coach people within their team. So we encourage a coaching environment and then, again, the leaders reporting their successes and their challenges. They're telling me what are the top three struggles that they're seeing with their people, and what are some of the solutions that we can collaborate to help, move their people that they've been called to, as they serve. Alright? Not only do we want to to make sure that that we have people we're developing, but here's another big, big critical role in the, metric that you've got to measure, and that's the number of leaders you actually have leading. John Maxwell says everything falls and rises on leadership, and the church it one of the biggest ways you can tell if a church is healthy is how healthy the leaders are and how many lit leaders they have with them. There is a Pareto rule for those of you that know, of this of this individual, from Italy that that he did an observation, and he he began to watch organization, and he noticed that 80% of the work was done by 20% of the people. So there is a translation of that in the church world to understand that that you should have about 20% of your congregation as leaders of your church. So if you look at the screen here, you'll see just as an example, if you got a 100 people in your church, you need to have 20 leaders to help carry that load. Anything less than that is going to cause the other leaders to strain, and and a good charge wants at least 20%. So the question that you gotta be asking yourself regularly is, how many leaders do we have? How many people are leading? We got a lot of people following. We got a lot of people excited, but help who is helping guide and push this vision along? So here's some ways that you do that is understanding and embracing that 2080 rule. Understanding that that that 20% is going to be the crux that brings the success or creates the frustration in your church. You should look at the number of leaders who are developing leaders. One of my mentor has has in has, made sure I understand very clearly, it's not enough to have a leader. Every one of your leaders should develop the next leader. We should have a pipeline of leaders, in other words, that is that is taken place in our church because we don't know when life is going to happen, and we're going to need somebody to step up. So we don't want to be reactive with the kingdom work. We want to be proactive with the kingdom work. And then, also, we can we can track it by the number of people who are completing leadership tracks, which means you have to have a system in place by which you're discipling people, not just only for their spiritual growth, which is very important, but you're discipling people to stick up step up and say, I wanna take charge in helping push forward this kingdom agenda that God has called our church to. Alright? Another, another, metric to measure that I think is very important is your year to year data. Now this one is a little more high level, and what we're saying here and and here's a reality that that all of our, churches have metrics that are unique to our church context. Texas, where I'm from, is different than than Connecticut and South Carolina. A a a a diver a culturally diverse church versus a church that's a little more or homogeneous, and its setup is different. And so, depending on, income structure could be different depending on the community that you're serving. And so what we have to learn to do is help from a healthy church standpoint, is compare ourselves to ourselves, which means I'm asking the question, how are we doing in comparison to the previous year? Alright? Which means you gotta start having basis points. We're we're looking at our year to year growth, our month to month growth, our quarterly growth. It's a very important metric that we have to spend time developing a historical database so that it helps steer us where we go, because our data should inform our next steps. It should not fully determine them, but it should inform them. So how do we track the year to year data? We compare the following, to previous years' quarters and months. For example, we compare what do our decisions for Christ look like this year compared to last year. Are we experiencing more decisions for Christ? Is that due to our growth, or is that something God is just doing supernaturally, which we know that ultimately is in God's hands? But we want to be able to pay attention to the decision of Christ, that are taking place, how many people are giving their life to the Lord. Discipleship. How many small new small groups do we have going on? How many people are coming to our midweek bible study? How many different things are being formed that are needing more leaders and shows more people hungry for God's word? Are giving are our tithes and offering? Are they trending in the upward direction? Am I looking at which many of us just came through this summertime. Was my summertime much lower than previous summers? If so, why? What about our end of year giving? We know that almost 40% of giving towards nonprofit takes take place in the last quarter of the year. Are we taking advantage of that? Have we seen that be a reality for our church? If so, is that trinity in the right direction? Service attendance. Are we growing month to month, year to year in our service attendance? Are we seeing more, within our service attendance, diversity? Event attendance. Many of us do a lot of community outreach. Many of us, do a lot, to to to reach those around us. Are we seeing those events trend upwards, or are we being effective with them? Again, year to year data comparison. The last, indicator, metric, I should say, that that I think you should measure is the joy factor of the church. You wanna make sure that you have a church that people are actually excited about, that they enjoy coming to, and and they're bringing somebody else because they feel like their life is being changed, that even though they're serving, they're serving with gladness, as the Bible says in Psalms 100, I believe. I took a study here that talked about 36% of actively religious, people describe themselves as very happy compared to 25% inactive and 25% inactive, unaffiliated, I should say. What this indicates is that there is a general trend that people tend to be happy belonging to a church than if they don't belong to 1 or don't even associate it to 1. Mexico Mexico, by the way, shout out to Mexico, 71% is their number, which my goal then is to challenge all of us to get to 71% of our church members feeling like they have a joy factor being a part of our church. So the question you should be asking is how happy are our church members with our church? It's not enough for the leaders to be excited about our church. Is the are the people that come to our church, that serve in our church, are they enjoying our church? Because some of us can do the mission, and there's no joy in it. It should be, but that does happen. So how do we track that? Here, at our church, we do surveys, so so we'll have leadership surveys that we do re regularly. We have volunteer surveys that we do. You should do a general church survey because each one of those pockets are gonna give you a different face or a different perspective on the healthiness of your church. You should have 1 on ones where a leader should always sit down with the other leaders and randomly sit down with other people and ask the question, how are you doing? How are you enjoying church? What are 2 things you love about church? What is one thing you you think that maybe we can grow in? Ministry group meetings. So so there's times where where, as a leader, I show up to different times that the minist ministries are having their meetings, or I may, take them out to to get lunch or something because I wanna hear more about that ministry and how they are enjoying or not enjoying serving at the church. And then testimonials. Always look for testimonials, you know, whether it's Google reviews that you get or anybody that's sharing something that has happened because they've been a part of your church. So my main thing today, we went over 7 different metrics that I believe are important to measuring and knowing how to effectively measure them. The reality of this is that I know that that, Ministry Branch is doing a great work with helping us as churches being able to accomplish this goal of reaching as many people for Christ as we can. And so I wanna encourage you again to take these metrics, figure out how you and your your church family and church leadership can come together and start measuring some of those that that you're not or even share in the chat some of the things that you're doing and how it's been effective for you. So at this time, I wanna take some questions, and and I see, one question that I'll take here. Thank you, Catherine. You asked the question, what platform do you use for surveys, and how often do you send out? Very good question. So so we do use a combination. First of all, Ministry Brand does have forms, that are that we utilize for a lot of these things. We do use some Google Doc and, Google forms as well. So the combination of those 2. So, like, with our, with our, new members, no. Our guests, We in our workflows and if you're not familiar with workflows, just sign up, for one of the platforms, and you'll be able to learn this. But in our workforce, it sends out those those surveys automatically. So every first time guest is automatically gonna get a survey. Our leaders are encouraged to regularly conduct surveys with their teams. I, as a pastor and leader, I have the leadership team do a survey every every on a regular basis of me as well. And so so I would say there are some that that can be weekly and almost instantly. There are some that are monthly, some that are quarterly, and some that are annually. But we wanna have a pulse on how people really feel and view, not just feel. Check this out. Also, view our church because perception for people is reality even if it's not the truth, and we gotta adjust that, perception. So, is there if there's any other questions or anything else anybody wants to share, definitely take time to do that. Have you noticed thank you, Josh. Joshua Smith here. Have you noticed a preferred communication method from new guests, email ver ver, versus text versus phone call? Amazing question. I will tell you, I may be a little biased. I think that you should do as many initial phone calls as you can up front and have a team that helps you do that with first time guests, and then have the system. Because in our system, we also have text messaging. So I know it's effective because we have a high percentage of, of our people that through text message and email either stay connected or they respond to surveys and things of that nature. Now we are unapologetic, but throughout the year, we probably over communicate. So we probably see more text messages than we should, and we really do leverage this email system. But, overall, we've we've heard nothing but good responses with the fact that we are trying to communicate with them. Do we have people that say unsubscribe? Yes. And Some of them are accidental, and we actually call those people and make sure that they really want to unsubscribe. We find out that the kid had hit the button when the text message came through. And so we make sure that those unsubscribes are legitimate, but we're not, we're not apologetic with the fact that we're gonna do everything we can to reach out to you. So whether it's phone, text, email, we do all of it as a combination. I think phone can be extremely powerful as the initial contact from time to time. But with that being said, as soon as somebody we put in the information on a Sunday morning, Sunday evening, they're getting the text message, they can