Dashboards: Keeping Track of How the Church is Doing

In my post last week, Focus on Spiritual Growth not "Discipleship" I talked about the dashboard at Community and how we track the number of 3C Christ Followers.  A number of people commented wanting to know more about the dashboard that we use at Community. 

This is an example of our current dashboard.  This pic shows the percentage of people that are connecting at each of our nine campuses and as a church overall.  We have set an expectation that we want 75% of our people connected in small groups.  As you can see in the diagram five of Community's campuses are beyond the 75% mark.  These are the campuses in green and they have between 84% and 120% of people connected.  The three in yellow have between 60% and 68% of the people connected in small groups.  And the one campus is currently in red is slightly below 60%.  We have several pages like this one that are updated on a weekly basis that show how many people are celebrating, connecting, contributing, giving, baptisms and more.  It is a terrific tool that helps you really understand numerically how you are doing as a church. 

If you want more on this topic I wrote an article titled: Golf Scores & Dashboards:  Keeping Track of How the Church is Doing.

Comments

[Eric Geiger]

Dave,

this is great stuff.

on measuring your groups, do you measure attendance each week, the number of people who go to a group over a span of weeks, number of groups with estimate of how many are in a group, or some other way?

thanks

eric geiger

[david rudd]

thanks dave,

my question is similar to Eric's. How do you come up with these percentages? What are you counting?

[Dave Ferguson]

First, we have created our own 3CMS database management system and it is designed to track the number of people that celebrate, connect and contribute. It's pretty remarkable. Our connect percentage is celebration service attendance over the small group population. So if we have 1000 in attendance at a campus and they have a small group population of 750, the connect percentage is 75%. We have set the bar for this year at 15% growth, 75% connected, 50% contributing, 10% (of our celebration in) baptisms and then also giving goals. I believe we need to raise the expectations. I'm thinking in terms of 20% for celebration, 80-85% for connect and 75% contributing. That will next years conversation.

[Larry Baxter]

Dave - what I really love here is how you tie in what you measure to your actual vision/mission of encouraging the development of 3C followers of Christ. I have a few questions:

- How do you make use of these numbers?
- Reggie McNeal's book "The Present Future" has a challenging section early on that talks about 'Changing the Scorecard'. If you're familiar with that book, how well do you think your approach considers the need to go beyond the walls of the church in engaging culture?
- Thanks for the earlier reply, I was going to reiterate the questions of the others, since the results are only as useful as the definition. The attendance in worship and small group is pretty clear. For contributing is that # of people serving in an identified ministry, or giving, or tithing? Any attempt to look at how people are celebrating God daily, or contributing to efforts outside the church?

Thanks - great post along with the other posts you reference!! - Larry

[Louie Marsh]

After looking at your article at the Christian Standard I'm a bit confused. How is it that the attendance number is different from the Celebrating number? Is the celebrating number just for members?

Also, are these figures totals or are you following individuals? I mean, is the X celebrating, X giving etc., Or are you tracking Joe Blow who celebrated this Sunday, contributed, etc.?

Sorry for all the annoying questions, but I'm trying to figure out how to make this work here, so I'm wondering.

Thanks and God bless!

[David Herrick]

Hey Dave,

Someone on our team just discovered a FREE web-based Dashboard application for churches called ChurchMetrics.com. I believe Lifechurch.TV developed it. Don't know if you've heard of it or used it, but I started inputing data into it last week for Waterfront to experiment with it, and it looks pretty good. We'll see if this is a useful tool over time. Thought I'd pass it along.

[Carolyn Blauser]

Check it out at: http://www.3cms.org/home

[Judy@In His Grip]

As a volunteer leader in our I church, I love this kind of data as it helps us know how effective our ministry is. But come on 120%? Now that just has to be pastor numbers, ha, ha:)

[Mike S]

how does COMMUNITY measure spiritual growth/formation? You mentioned in your discipleship posting earlier that a church needs to get beyond anecdotes to scratch at how you know you're actually accomplishing your hypothesis (that celebrating, connecting and contributing ratios yield maturing Christ followers)...what are some gauges you have found work well for your context, Dave?

I'm thinking along the REVEAL study concepts and knowing some things we tinker with at Grace Point Church (San Antonio), but would like to see how you've aligned some gauges to your missional framework.