We’ve been working to improve our metrics at CCV.  Our first deliverable is the Church Health Report.  It contains several of what we feel are the most important metrics to watch from week to week.  The data for the report is captured using Arena’s metrics features.  Some items (like worship service attendance) are entered by hand while others (children’s attendance, small groups) are updated weekly by the system.  The report is generated using SQL Server Reporting Services.  We see it being auto emailed to a distribution list once fully implemented.  Below is a quick walk though of each of the areas of the report.

(Warning the values of the metrics above aren’t fully entered so don’t put too much stock in the values.  Some of the values like the small group numbers have some flaws in how they are queried from the database that we’re still working on.  I couldn’t wait any longer to share… : )

Each metric is represented as a row with the following columns: 

• Title – The name of the metric
• Last 10 Values – After the name of the metric we show a sparkline chart of the last 10 weeks of results. 
• Current - Next we show the current value of the metric. 
• Current Run – This represents the media value of the last 4 weeks.  This represents the results of a lot of thought.  First remember that the median is the middle value of the last four weeks of values once sorted highest to lowest (actually in this case it would be the average of the two middle values since it’s an even number of values).  We did this to help flatten skews in the data that events such as Easter and Christmas can create.  How many times have you heard a metric reported as “Attendance is down -2% compared to last year but Easter is late this year so it should be +10%”.  This median calculation will eliminate the skew these dates can cause. 
• % Change – This is the percent change between the current value and the current run.  “We’re down 3.19% in attendance in the Contemporary service compared with the median of last four weeks.”
• Last Year Run – This is the median value of the same four weeks last year.
• % Change – This is the % change between the Current Run and the Last Year Run.  This is a good comparison of the relative progress in the last 365 days.

Under all of these metrics we then show graphs of each metric compared to last year.  A sample of what that would look like for the Contemporary Service is below.

We end the report with a listing of how each metric is sourced (i.e. Attendance for the Contemporary Service is inputted by hand from usher counts) and definitions of each of the columns above.

You can download the whole report here as a PDF.  I blurred out our giving numbers on this report.  I had permission from our Executive Pastor to put the report on-line unaltered, but it just felt weird having our giving numbers posted out on the Internet.  We post them in the bulletin each week our our attendees to see, but that’s a bit different.

If your an Arena customer we’ll be posting the RDL file to the community once we’re sure everything is working well.

Any thoughts?  Ideas?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Information Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.