Measure success correctly—or why a big turnout doesn’t necessarily mean a successful event

How do you measure success in a church outreach event? Immediately after any event is a great time to evaluate past actions and plan future successes.

A great turnout doesn't equal great results

I recently looked at a church website that celebrated the great success of their fall outreach by listing the number of hot dogs served and bags of candy given away. Though I understand they were celebrating that they got a great turnout for their event, a great turnout alone does not make for a successful church event, especially for this kind of event. If you do even the most minimal advertising, it's difficult not to get a great turnout when you are giving away free food and candy.

Some questions:

• What made this church event different from the similar events hosted by the local mall or downtown merchants?
• What did people learn about the church from attending the event?
• How many people came back to church the following week because of the event?
• Did the attendees learn anything about Jesus from the event?
• Did the attendees leave with any follow-up information that invited them back to the church or gave them information on how to find out more about the Christian life?

We've got to get honest with ourselves about the results of what we do if we want to make an impact on our world. If your answers to these questions aren't all you want them to be, take some time to think about how you can make your upcoming events produce the results you want. The following ideas might help.

Following is an excerpt from my book, The Five Steps of Effective Church Communication and Marketing (it is currently under revision, I'll post updates when it's done)  that discusses the importance of keeping score of the success or failure of outreach events.

The introduction that leads into the book excerpt that follows discusses how everybody (trained or not) has an opinion about what makes for effective church communication. With all respect, sometimes those opinions are neither valid, correct, or useful if we are trying to win our world for Jesus. It then talks about in many other areas of life, such as a basketball game, what makes for a successful game isn't opinion, it's the score. The chapter continues....

The Five Steps give us a way to keep score in church communications.

To keep peace in the body of Christ, this can be very helpful in that the bottom line for evaluating the effectiveness of any piece of communication or church marketing is not whether someone likes it or not. If the goal of effective church communications, as measured by The Five Steps, is to fully fulfill the Great Commission, the measure of success is whether this goal is being fulfilled or not. Just like in basketball--you look at the score.

The score in fully fulfilling the Great Commission has two parts:

1. That people come to know Jesus as Savior

2. That they grow to maturity in their faith and become disciples

Let’s get real and honest in our evaluation

Effective church communication involves much more than who thinks they are right and who doesn’t. It matters much more than who likes what or who is not wanting to change a way they’ve “always done” something. It also means you don’t change things or do away with something because somebody went to a big church that did this or that.

You look at lives. You look at behavior.

Are they changing or not as a result of your communications?

Keeping score starts by simple counting

This is not rocket science. Score-keeping in church communications is determined by first of all by attendance, the simple numbers of people that respond (or didn’t) after you created and distributed your communications.

The score is determined by asking questions such as these:

Did you do a mailing? Send a postcard?  An email? Web announcement? Pulpit announcement?

Did you equip your people with communication tools? Connection cards, postcards, website links?

How many people attended event? How many were new to the church?

The simple numbers of how many new people attend the church, why and what brought them there is important because you cannot start the road toward sharing the message of salvation without people getting inside the church and becoming part of the process. Whether your church accepts people as believers with a simple confession of faith after one visit or whether becoming a Christian is defined by a series of explorations and classes,  followed by a decision and baptism, or any combination of these events, whatever your tradition, it must start with simple attendance.

Be honest in record keeping and evaluation

For example, if you put on a Christmas outreach event and you spend thousands of dollars, what was your return on investment? Again ask the questions above: how many are now attending the church because of the event? How many have become Christians because of the event?

I suspect far too many churches do Christmas and other holiday events because the people attending the church really like to put on the events. To decide if this is the primary motivation—track the results. To repeat: how many new people are now attending the church because of the event? How many have become Christians because of the event?

If you aren’t tracking costs and results, why not?

Even without tracking it, if you know the answer is something like “We didn’t do a very good job of communicating it to people outside the church and we can’t honestly point to anyone who is now attending or who has come to know Jesus because of it,” you then have two choices:

1. You can learn to communicate more effectively (this website give you lots of ways to do this, become a member so you can get all the benefits) so that your holiday events will yield measurable results in the future.

or

2. Quit spending all that money to entertain yourselves and give it either to a mission group or church that is successful in outreach or give it to feed hungry children.

Track more than holiday events; track all ministry events

Tracking our communications and the results of them will keep us honest in church programming and evaluation.

It can keep us from over spiritualizing. What I mean by that is that it is easy to conclude that people aren’t interested in something such as spiritual growth, when we simply didn’t advertise it very well.

Honest evaluation can also keep us from false excuses. As talked about earlier in the book, you can create many communication pieces today for little or no cost (see Strategy chapter). A popular excuse in the fall of 2009 as I write this is that “We just can’t afford to advertise church events because of the recession.” There is a lot of marketing that doesn’t cost much: web-based, email-based advertising, creating websites and blogs with WordPress.com; making sure what you do create has complete details, involving your people instead of buying mailing lists, e.g. equip them with inexpensive postcards to mail to friends—all these ideas can generate lots of church marketing for little or no money.

A lack of money might force us to try new things. Even if finances improve, we don’t have to spend increased money on communications now that we’ve learned how to communicate more cost-effectively. Giving to missions and to hunger relieving projects is far more important than unnecessary advertising expenses.

In summary, honestly measure the success of your communications by honestly evaluating their spiritual impact by determining from the event:

• How many people moved closer to a relationship with Jesus?
• How many people grew in their relationship to Jesus?

Once you have an honest measure, you can then work on whatever changes you need to make for more Great Commission-fulfilling result from your communication efforts.