5 Numbers You Should Track in Your Ministry and Why

Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash

I’ve heard business entrepreneurs say that you have to know your numbers. The same is true with your ministry. How many attended this week? Last week? How many volunteers? First time guests? Baptisms? Small Groups?

If you don’t track it, and by tracking, I mean write it down in a spreadsheet, you’re losing out on valuable information that can help you keep your ministry healthy and growing.

I’ll admit I didn’t always do this. In fact, my first few years in ministry it was an afterthought. Sometimes, I would remember to count how many were in the room and tell my pastor, but I never wrote it down.

Then after one Easter, my pastor came into staff meeting agitated. I could see it all over his face. He told us that we didn’t have as many show up for Easter as we did the year before. He counted the weekend as a failure. I was shocked at first and then began to wonder, how many did I have? How many last year? Or the year before? I had no Idea.

I have a pretty good memory, so I could recall how many were in the room for the past 2-3 weeks. But I couldn’t tell you how many were there the year before.

I decided to create a dashboard. Similar to the dashboard of your car, it tracks all the important metrics for your church. The main church had one, but I didn’t have one for kids. Because I wanted to go deeper than just how many were in the room, I decided to make one just for kids ministry.

I’ve tracked a lot of different things, and boiled it down to 5 essential numbers you should track and why.

1. Total Attendance

You should know how many are in the room. This may be the most important number and why most church dashboards only track it. But if you’re running a ministry that has to maintain room ratios you need to know how many kids and volunteers are in there. In addition, it will help you to know how many activity pages to print, crafts to prepare, or gifts to give away.

By writing down your numbers week to week, you can look back over the last year and see if you’re growing or not. If you don’t have your numbers, you’re just going by feeling. And Jeremiah said that heart is deceitful. Have the numbers tell you the truth.

To measure the health of the ministry I would use the total attendance numbers to figure out 4 metrics.

• The percent difference from the year before on the same week,
• The percent difference from 6 months prior
• The percent difference of the average attendance for the year
• The percent difference of the average attendance compared to the year before.

Each one of these metrics tells a story and helps me gather a wider view of how we’re doing. So, when I have a low-attended Sunday, I’ll look at the year before. If it’s about the same, then I’ll ask why. Many times, it’s because it’s a holiday weekend, not because I’m a failure.

Alternatively, if I have an especially high day, I have to ask why? Is it close to one of the big days, Easter, Mother’s Day, Christmas, Father’s Day? Are the adults starting a new series? Is there some kind of guest push?

Once I find out the why, I’ll create a comment in the cell to help me remember the next time I'm comparing.

2. Small groups

You may or may not have small groups in your ministry, but you do need to collect some overall demographic data. I track the grade and gender in each ministry and can tell you at any time how many second grade girls or fifth grade boys we have. This information is vital for knowing how to staff your ministry and preparing for the future.

Since I had small groups in my main service, I needed to know how big each group was and if I needed to work on recruiting new help. If the group started to average 8 or more then I needed to find a new leader. If it started averaging to 10 or higher then I really needed to find a leader!

Also, a frequent question I would get around graduation time was, “How many are moving up?” Since I knew how many fifth graders, seniors, or kindergartners there were I could easily answer the question and prepare for the age shift in the room.

One time I was pouring over the numbers and noticed that there was a drastic attendance drop in my second graders. The first and third graders were about the same size, but the second graders were less than half.

I started to look back at earlier data and since my predecessor’s records were not as detailed as mine, all I could find was total attendance. But that told a story as well. About 3 years before the average attendance in kids church was 30% higher in January of that year than compared to now. Then during and after the summer, there was a steep decline.

I started to ask the staff that was there back then why this happened and showed them my research. They were confused as well until they remembered that summer 2 staff members left and there was a major restructuring of the children and youth ministry staff.

This caused an overall dip in attendance as many people left the church including parents of Kindergartners whose kids are now second graders.

Without tracking the demographic numbers we’d have never known.

3. Milestones

In children’s ministry, I wanted every kid by the time they graduated fifth grade to be saved, baptized, serving, and baptized in the Holy Spirit or at least seeking it. You can read more about these in this post.

I think these are great milestones, but I had to track them otherwise it was just wishful thinking. Stating a goal might help you achieve it but keeping track of your progress almost guarantees it.

These numbers weren’t tracked every week because we didn’t have them, but when they did occur, I made sure I added them to my dashboard.

By the end of the year, I could celebrate how many salvations and baptisms there were and build momentum for the coming year.

4. Visitors

Rich Birch has often said that if you want to grow your church to a certain number, you need that many first-time visitors come through your door.

I don’t think this is always true, but a sign of healthy church is one that has a good visitor flow. So, you need to track how many are actually coming. 

Every week as part of my follow up process, I would run a report of how many people attended that had not come once in the last 6 months. Then I would take it a step further and track second and third time attenders as well.

It’s believed that if a person has come to your church or restaurant or venue (it doesn’t matter) three times within a short amount of time, then they’ve created a habit and are far more likely to attend.

The number of people that fall into each step are smaller than the one before, but it does give some indicators of guest retention.

It doesn’t do any good to have 100 first time guests if none of them come back. But if 33 start coming to your church regularly, then you have a huge win. So, if there’s a major drop between each step, then you need to look at the follow up and connection processes of the ministry. Find out what’s going on and fix it.

5. Discipleship Elements

A lot of children’s ministries have stores or Bible Bucks or some kind of incentives for kids to memorize scripture, bring their Bibles, give in the offering, etc. If that’s you, then you need to track the effectiveness of your reward system.

At my last church we had a store where we gave kids coins for doing some of the things listed above. It was a major expense and time consuming to keep it manned and stocked. It also created a bottle neck at check-in as kids tried to get credit for everything.

However, I started to keep track of how many kids were actually participating in the program and how many were just taking the freebies. I found in a ministry of 100 kids only 4(!) were actually doing the work.

That’s not a good number.

So, I decided to totally rework my store and experimented with a couple of different ideas until I landed on something that had a lot more participation and the kids were learning.

If I hadn’t tracked those numbers, I’d still be using the coin system for 1% of my kids.

Tracking numbers can be a pain and I know not everyone gets as excited about spreadsheets as much as I do. However, if you want your ministry to be healthy and grow, you need to know your numbers to know where you’ve been and where you’re going.

If you’d like a copy of my dashboard to use, drop me a comment and I’ll send it your way!