Engagement: What It Is, How We Can Measure It, and Why It Matters for Your Church

One of the Church’s latest buzzwords we’re hearing over coffee and in meetings is “engagement.” (Check out Google’s chart for how often the term is used and notice the steep peak of the last 20 years.)

Buzzwords often have nuance, and engagement is no exception. Chances are, each person who uses “engagement” in a church setting has a slightly different definition/meaning of what she/he is trying to convey.

We define engagement as: to participate or become involved in. Engagement is a verb; the act of engaging is something people do.

Guest engagement is guest participation and response, so when we’re looking at how to measure guest participation or response, we’re looking at more than the number of people filling seats or streaming online. We’re looking at how guests and members interact with and participate in the church.

Measuring Guest Engagement

To our knowledge, there is no industry standard that defines modern-day church engagement. (If you have one, let us know!)

We recommend your engagement metrics be tied to your specific community, its work and its needs.

Needs vary from organization to organization, but when serving the guest is at the forefront of the church’s mission, the work and how we can measure it becomes clear. We can focus less about what everyone else is doing and how we can serve the people right in front of us based on what we know about their habits and interactions.

For example, every week for the past five years, church staffer Carol has sent out a weekly newsletter via email every Thursday at 2 p.m. Carol invests about eight hours total each week to make sure this happens without fail.

Carol works with Sam (the Groups Ministry leader), Tim (the Student Ministry leader), Tami (the Kids’ Ministry Leader), and Rhonda (the Finance Leader) to create the newsletter each week.

They each spend about 1.5 hours a week contributing to the newsletter. This equates to 14 hours each week, 728 hours a year. If we assume they are averaging $40k a year in salaries, we can estimate that this newsletter costs the church $14,560 a year solely in staff time to create it. 

How does the church measure the return on this investment? How many guests read the newsletter each week and respond or engage with the content?

What if we started collecting data and discovered that, on average, each week, six people responded to the newsletter. Each response is costing the church approximately $46.

From a cost standpoint, is it worth it? Would you keep doing it?

Why Measuring Engagement Matters

Knowing various ways your guests and members engage with the church helps you know where to invest and where to focus less, especially as the church grows.

When a church is small, its leaders can have a good pulse read on the congregation at any point. You know who is involved and in what ministries, who attends which service, and who has a family member in the hospital.

But, as the church grows, it can become harder to keep tabs on each member, his/her story and his/her needs. It gets easier for guests to be overlooked or remain unseen. When you have systems in place to help measure engagement and don’t rely only on the one-on-one connections that worked with a smaller congregation, you can stay focused on investing in what your church needs based on the metrics that matter. And that’s fuel for a growing church.

What do you think? We’d love to hear.

Looking to make your data more meaningful? Let’s get started.