Lucy and Ethel are always up to their elbows in trouble––but on this episode of I Love Lucy, they literally get up to their elbows in bread. A slab of floury, white, unbaked dough hangs from Lucy’s hands, stretching toward the floor while Ethel helps drag it back up to the counter. Just wait 'til you see how it comes out of the oven. That’s what bread looks like when you’ve put far, far too much yeast in your recipe.
They didn’t do this on purpose. The ladies wanted a nice loaf of fresh-baked, from-scratch bread, but they just didn’t get it right. They didn’t measure closely enough. Lucy and Ethel didn’t always learn from their mistakes (otherwise then we wouldn’t have so many episodes to binge on). But you can take a lesson from everyone’s favorite funny lady duo.
Keep the results of poor planning and measuring in mind as you bake up a campaign strategy to create ministry movement in your church. Measuring the movement, or “impact,” your campaign content has on the growth of your church isn’t just about data. It’s about momentum, growth, and maturity. You’re not counting just for the sake of counting. Your campaigns should help people take the next steps in the church, and support your mission.
We’re not just talking about facts and figures today when we talk about measuring. Analytics and numbers are great for making investment decisions and determining budget, but today, we’re going to help you measure something that most of our customers find a little difficult: how your content is helping your church members grow closer to Jesus, closer to each other, and more connected to your mission.
When we say we want to measure the “impact” of our content, what we’re really saying is, “Did it achieve my goals of X, Y, and Z?” For the sake of our example, let’s say our goal was to create a closer, stronger, more connected church.
With the goal to create a closer, stronger, and more connected church, we would look back at the strategy we had for achieving it. Hopefully, we created a kind of “campaign” full of smaller actions––all working to reach the goal. For instance, perhaps we worked with the pastor to create a sermon series about community building. The sermon revolved around themes of “fellowship,” “connectedness,” and “holding each other accountable in love.”
While our pastor may not have outright said it in every sermon, the purpose of these messages was to encourage our members to get more involved in the small groups and ministries that bring the church closer together. We wanted them to feel like joining not out of obligation, but out of inspiration. Encouraging the growth of things like small groups was merely the vehicle we used to reach listeners.
We might also have hosted a few ministry outreach events, promoted small groups on social media, and hosted a podcast about how important it is to find close friends within the larger church.
Now that we’ve identified the measurable parts of our strategy, we can take a closer look. Was there an increase in small group attendance and ministry involvement?
While it might have seemed tricky to measure something like “closeness” in our church, we can definitely get some great data on how your small group attendance and ministry involvement numbers have grown since we started our “closer, stronger, more connected” content campaign. We can measure these changes over time, from the start of our content to the point we’re at now. If we ask our new small group or ministry members why they decided to join, how many will say they did so because of something from our strategy? How many people have we reached through our campaign?
This is the impact our content is having. This is the change we are making through our work in the church. It may seem like numbers on a page, but remember, those are all real people. Our sermon series, podcasts, social media posts––all of it––those pieces of content have helped create this change in people’s lives.
By accomplishing the goal of creating a more connected, stronger church, we should start to see some changes in our campus. Our members will be getting more involved in more personal ways. Our congregation will get more mature. Maybe we had more members of small groups become hosts, which means the small groups are nurturing the next wave of leadership.
Our campaign has impacted personal growth in a real way. We’ve helped the church––as a whole and individually––take the next steps.