Metrics

Last week I mentioned that the attendance metric hasn't been one of the metrics we have chosen to measure in the history of the church where I serve. Someday we will probably start measuring our numbers, but not for the purpose of gauging success.

Honestly, we haven't been great at measuring anything in the 50-year history of the church. And that's not always a good thing. People are always measuring something, even if not accurately.

Our church doesn't "officially" measure attendance, but it hasn't ever been rare to hear someone say "gosh, attendance was down this week," or "wow, it was a big Sunday." What's funny about that, is that it wasn't at all uncommon to hear both comments on the same Sunday in the same service. That hasn't ever been a huge deal because it isn't a benchmark for our success.

What is a benchmark for our success is movement toward spiritual development and external focus. So, on Sunday we did a church-wide survey during our service. Our hope is to set a benchmark this year and then measure our progress from year to year.

Whatever "success" is for your organization, it's important to measure and track. Otherwise, you'll never know how your organization is doing. You'll be relegated to gauging success at the whim of whomever skews the data to support their agenda.

1 comments:

Deb said...

I like the benchmarks that your church has chosen--movement towards spiritual development & external focus. How do you measure those? What was the on the survey & how was it administered? How will you measure progress? I'm not looking to copy it, I just think this is very interesting.