My wife and I are members of a small independent church. A few months ago, during a leadership meeting, we presented a summary of last year’s attendance chart. Besides Easter and Christmas, which are always among the most attended Sundays in the year, the highest attending weekend was in November, when our church, like many others, does a Fall Festival for kids and families – a substitute for Halloween. Inspired by that data, our leaders decided to invest time and resources to serve our community around the same dates in 2019. The result was a well-attended Sunday service and a major event afterwards, as dozens of additional families came for the candy, fun, and fellowship. It was one of the best opportunities to serve our community this year.
How We Decided
This is a very small example of a best practice in management that has become popular. It is about making decisions (when to reach out to our community) based on hard data (last year’s attendance chart) instead of deciding to do our outreach based on a guess or simply whenever we felt like it.
Four Practices for Data-driven Decisions
Business and non-profit organizations these days are making more and more decisions based on solid data instead of instinct, in most cases with far better results. Of course, big corporations have the resources to collect sophisticated data, hire analysts to interpret it, and consulting firms to advise on how to apply the insights gleaned from data. You and I probably don’t have that luxury, but, as the case of our small church shows, we can still make data-driven decisions based on smaller amounts of data if we observe a few basic practices.
Be strategic. Before embarking on this journey, brainstorm, discuss, and decide what kind of data you want and the purposes for collecting data. In our case, we have been collecting Sunday attendance every week in order to analyze patterns and make priority decisions for our church. We plan our year to reach the largest possible amount of people with the Gospel by investing in these popular “Church Sundays.”
Collect the right data. That’s part of the strategic decisions you have to make up front. Make sure to collect data that can be useful for making decisions in the future. Another set of attendance data our church collects is about children. That information helps us to make informed decisions about resources, use of our limited space, etc.
Be consistent. You can only trust data if you are consistent in collecting it. The reason we were able to use the attendance data was because people have been registering Sunday attendance for more than two years.
Share data broadly. Make sure everyone involved with your vision and organization has access to the data. You never know where the best ideas will come from. Our successful 2019 fall festival was the direct result of sharing the attendance chart with our church leadership.
Making decisions based on data isn’t new, but in our digital age, it has become much easier to collect, analyze and apply data. Whether it is Sunday church attendance or detailed internet traffic information, using data to make conscious strategic decisions can make us better stewards of the vision God has entrusted to us and the resources he has put at our disposal.
Data and information are essential for knowing how effective your organization or ministry is, but knowing the right data to measure is the most important key to your success.