CTR: Metrics

A metric is a measure for quantitatively assessing the degree to which an organization possesses a given attribute. As much as it pains church plants and even established churches,  sometimes the numbers are important! It is not a contest as to how many members or attenders you have but at some point you may have to make decisions based on exactly that. It is not a bad thing to know how many people are attending a small group or Sunday school class and what percentage that is from your entire congregation. To make an informed decision is a great thing and to do so with the knowledge of how much money is coming in and going out and where it is all going can only add to the value. All of these things are measurements or metrics that are needed in your church for procurement (buying or getting stuff) and strategic planning (making wise decisions for the future).  

Now that we have the what and why out of the way, we can focus on the how. Chances are you probably already track these things and if you are an established church, you already have a system. The accountant keeps some of the information and the administrative assistant keeps the rest and you pull it together in its raw form before each board meeting so you can show everybody why you can't or can do what is being proposed. I am guessing at least the first part is true, you see most churches and church board members or trustees rarely look at both pieces of this information before making most of their decisions. The big reason for this is they don't know what one has to do with the other or if they do, because it is in different locations, it is hard to pull together an accurate picture at any specific point in time. Honestly, raw digits are nice but a picture tells the whole story. The good news here is there is a product out there that happens to be FREE that can help.

Thanks to LifeChurch.tv you can track and get a snapshot of all of these things at any time from anywhere (including your board meetings). You can find this tool at churchmetrics.com take full advantage of all it has to offer. It has support for multiple users and multiple people, has built in reports that can be exported in Excel if you need the raw data. Best of all it offers a dashboard and charts so you can watch your growth or decline and make better decisions at any time. I am very impressed and the free price tag makes this the easiest decision of all. Go to http://www.churchmetrics.com/features to review all it has to offer.