Measuring success as a for-profit company is pretty straightforward. At the end of the day there should be, well, profit.
But if your organization’s primary reason for existence isn’t to make money but to make change, how do you know you’re executing your strategy well? In this article, I’m going to outline a simple framework for measuring digital ministry success. This framework will help you think through what’s important and how you can measure progress.
Ways to measure digital ministry success
Hopefully, we can all agree that setting measures of success is important:
- Numbers represent the individual lives impacted by the ministry and the work you do. That’s worth measuring and celebrating.
- Measuring progress holds the ministry as a whole—as well as the individuals serving within the organization—accountable to the goal.
- This accountability is part of stewarding donations well.
Financials
For-profit companies measure things like revenue and profit, while nonprofits tend to focus on donations. Organizations that rely on donations to operate can measure the number of individual donors, the average donation amount, the number of recurring donors, the frequency of donations, or the longevity of a supporter.
The flip side of measuring the donations coming in is measuring the impact of those donations. How many people do you serve? How far can you stretch each dollar? How much is going to operating expenses?
Interactions
For digital ministry, interactions are an accessible measurement. For example, a broadcast ministry can measure the number of videos watched, audio sermons listened to, or articles read per user. Organizations can look at data such as the number of unique visitors to a site, their average time on the page, or their bounce rate. And others might measure how many visitors sign up for a user account or how frequently users visit the site.
Progress through the user journey
Another option is to measure progress through the user journey. Whether you have formalized the user journey using a tool such as a user journey map or simply have an idea of the steps your ideal user will take over time, use these milestones to measure progress through that journey.
For example, EveryCampus launched a prayer walk app in 2020 with a short-term goal of covering every college campus in the United States with prayer and a long-term goal of establishing gospel communities on each one.
For them, the user journey includes registering for a prayer walk, completing the prayer walk, continuing to pray for that college campus, becoming involved with campus ministry, and finally, leading a discipleship group on campus. Measuring how people move through each stage is an important part of evaluating your organization’s digital ministry success.
So which should you measure?
This is a sampling of the possibilities, not an exhaustive list by any means. But making it onto the list doesn’t mean it’s automatically the right thing to measure. Knowing what to collect is an important part of user research; knowing what to measure ensures you’re working toward executing your strategy well.
For example, user sessions on your website or a board that’s happy because your site redesign was inexpensive might be easy to measure—and even look impressive at first glance—but they don’t necessarily point to success for your organization.
A vision-based framework for digital ministry success
Instead of starting by looking at the things you can easily measure, start with a vision-based framework. To measure success, you must unpack why your organization exists in the first place. This has probably already been summarized in your vision or mission statement. I prefer to start with the vision statement because it’s focused on the organization’s desired future.
Breaking your vision statement down phrase by phrase helps you determine measurable outcomes for each phrase. This strategy works because it keeps a sharp focus on measuring what’s important. And it allows you to see where your ministry might be falling short in achieving that vision so you can create a strategy to improve. (Of course, if you find that you can’t measure the success of your vision statement, it might be worth redefining your vision to make it more concrete and measurable.)
Let’s look at a couple of examples:
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Here is InterVarsity‘s vision statement. Even though it is aspirational and abstract, we can still use it to define and measure desired outcomes. I don’t know if these are the exact metrics they track, but I do know their digital strategy aligns well with their vision.
The purpose of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA
is to establish and advance
at colleges and universities
witnessing communities of students and faculty
who follow Jesus as Savior and Lord:
growing in love for God,
God’s Word,
God’s people of every ethnicity and culture,
and God’s purposes in the world.
The first step is to break the vision down into phrases:
The purpose of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA
is to establish and advance
at colleges and universities
This can be measured by audience size. That might include the number of schools with InterVarsity chapters, the number of staff, or the number of students InterVarsity serves.
They can also measure traffic to a website or email subscribers, but those numbers alone don’t satisfy this vision statement. Instead, dig deeper. Are there effective calls to action that draw interested visitors into chapter involvement or even to establish a new chapter? Tracking those response rates is a good way to know.
These are all measurable and are strong indicators that InterVarsity’s strategy is or isn’t working.
Moving on to the next phrase…
witnessing communities of students and faculty
who follow Jesus as Savior and Lord
This speaks of engagement. The audience is taking action by “witnessing” and “follow[ing].” Digging into periodic survey results can help measure this level of engagement, and they can also infer a bit by looking at performance metrics. Does the audience keep returning because of the value delivered? This can be measured through analytics such as logins and user sessions.
growing in love for God,
God’s Word,
God’s people of every ethnicity and culture,
and God’s purposes in the world.
Growth can be facilitated in many ways: relationships, mentoring, education, resources, etc. The last two, education and resources, are straightforward to measure. Are they providing resources to facilitate growth? Is anyone reading that content? How long are they spending with it? Are lives being changed? Measuring this is a bit more subjective but can be done through additional surveys or user interviews and looking for ways to quantify those results (e.g., using the classic “on a scale of 1 to 5” type question).
Compassion International
Let’s step through another example. Compassion isn’t an Agathon client, but this is still a solid example because of how well their online presence supports their mission.
Our mission is to release children from poverty in Jesus’ name.
Short and sweet! If you look at Compassion’s site, the focus is on pairing sponsors with individual children. The results are measured by the number of sponsored children who are spared from the worst of poverty because their daily needs are subsidized by donors. They also can measure number of donors, total donations, and donor retention rate.
Mercy Ships
Here’s another short and sweet example from Mercy Ships:
Mercy Ships uses hospital ships to transform lives and serve nations, one at a time.
There are many metrics Mercy Ships can use to see how well they’re achieving this vision: number of nations served or number of patients or procedures. This work, of course, relies on donor support. In addition to tracking the donor metrics outlined above, they could also measure average amount spent per patient.
Measurement leads to action
While measurement is an important part of growth and stewardship, you shouldn’t be measuring for the sake of the data. Instead, measure the items you plan to take action on. That’s why I recommend tying your measurement to your vision. This offers assurance that you’re looking at the right things.
But just as important as measuring is making a plan to improve and grow in each area. The action is what moves you closer to your goals and vision.
Now it’s your turn!
Go ahead and pull out your vision statement. Break it down into phrases. And brainstorm metrics for each one.
I’m a big fan of the design sprint phrase, “How might we…?” to help with this part. As an example, “How might we measure constituent engagement?” Your answers will be different than my examples above because your organization is different. This is not a case where one size fits all!
As you’re identifying areas to measure, keep looking back at your vision statement. The statement is the goal you’re working toward, and the things you’re measuring and setting goals around should support that vision.