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How do you determine or measure assimilation for your church?  Which statistics (criteria) do you rely on for determining how successful (or not!) you are in getting people connected?  Also what is the source of these numbers?  Do they reside in one central point of knowledge (database) or are they in multiple data repositories?

Chris Wood

Fellowship Technologies 

 

 

Hi Chris,

I've heard from our customers that the mindset that being a member of the church = being a disciple seems to be going away. 

Level 1 = First Visit

Level 2 = Regular participation in church events

Level 3 = Regular participation + Volunteering and/or sporadic Giving

Level 4 = Regular volunteering + Regular Giving

Level 5 = Lay Leadership + Regular Giving

I'd be interested to hear if the same criteria above applies to other churches. 

I realize that this thread is over a year old. But I am interested in the question because I am in the process of "re-engineering" our assimilation process. After three years of rapid growth (from just over 400 to over 3300) the old process is broken.

So I am in the midst of redesigning a scalable system that will work whether we're 3000 or 30,000. My thoughts on this are still in the process of formation, but here's my thinking at this point:

• The "assimilation process" is everything a guest experiences from the time they first arrive on our campus until they reach the "final gate."
• We have designed a process that is proactive; we actively shepherd them through the process by presenting the "next step" all along the way
  
• The "final gate" is achieved when they are either active in a small group or tell us that they don't want to be in a small group.
• Success in assimilation is when they are actively involved in a transformational small group, and the "success ratio" = N(t)/T(t) where N=number actively involved in a small group and T=the total number of guests in a given time frame(t).

As for where this data will reside and how it will be tracked, that is an open question at this point. If FellowshipOne is capable of tracking this information - EASILY - then we'll keep it there. But if not, we'll be looking for another solution.

 

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Bud Brown
The Heights Church

Is there a report that will measure this?

This data can be tracked in F1 by using participant assignments (value for N) and people statuses (value for T). Here is what you need to do.

1. Be sure every one who is active in a small group has a participant assignment to the small group they are in.
Small Groups are configured in F1 as RLC's (Room Location or Class name) within an activity. Once you have created all your RLC's (small groups) you can then create participant assignments to those RLC's. This can be done either by portal users through the F1 Portal or by small group leaders through the small group manager module. Report M3015 will report the total number of people who have PA's to the activity and break it down by RLC.
See the video on "Small groups" under the MINISTRY Section of Free Video Library for more instructions on how to setup small groups in F1.

2. Be sure you are updating people statuses as they change. People statuses were intended to describe the current relationship of an individual to your church. For example people who are not regular in their attendance could be given a status as "Guest" or "Visitor". At some point you could "upgrade" their status to "Attendee" when there is evidence of reoccurring attendance or giving. Attendees who have completed all the requirements for membership (such as a membership class) could be given a status of "Member". Report P1004 will report the total number of people who have a given status.

Lets say you run those reports and M3015 shows you have 869 people with PA's into your small group ministry and P1004 shows you have 2765 people with an "Attendee" or "Member" status. Now all you have to do is divide 869 by 2765 and to discover you assimilation percentage is 31%.

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Bob VanDerPloeg
Delivery Manager
Fellowship Technologies