Case Study: Collecting Worshipping Community statistics (Church of England)

Customers within the Church of England may wish to use ChurchSuite to assist them in collating their Worshipping Community statistics. In this case study, we demonstrate how you might use the features of ChurchSuite to help you collect and report on the relevant data, as laid out in the Church of England's Statistics for Mission information sheet: Worshipping Community.

Many of the features we'll suggest in this article enable you to identify people using Smart Tag conditions, so you're able to create one "Worshipping Community" Smart Tag in the Address Book module surfacing all of your adult Worshipping Community, and one Smart Tag in the Children module for children. We'll also make use of Fixed Tags, Key Dates and Custom Fields.

Those who come to Sunday and midweek services

For customers who use People Tracking within the Attendance module and track attendance at Sunday and midweek services, you can use a smart tag condition in your Worshipping Community Smart Tag like this:

For customers who don't use People Tracking within the Attendance module, you may wish to use a custom field (see related article at the bottom of this page) to mark how regularly a contact attends:

Depending on your context, you may wish to make this editable by contacts, so that your congregation can select the answer to this question themselves, via My ChurchSuite or a consent request. You can then use Smart Tag conditions like these:

Those who are ill and unable to come to church

First, identify those who are unwell and unable to come to church by adding them to a fixed tag. You may need to create a new fixed tag:

Then add a smart tag condition to your Worshipping Community Smart Tag:

You will then need to regularly review those in the "Ill and unable to attend" fixed tag, and remove those who are recovered and able to attend, while adding others who have become ill and are unable to attend.

Top tip!

Have you considered using a flow to manage your pastoral care? Our Case Study: Managing pastoral care talks through how. You could use a smart tag condition to identify those within your Pastoral Visits flow:

Those who are away on holiday or business

As with those who are ill and unable to attend, you can use a fixed tag to identify those who are away on holiday or on business, which you would review regularly and add/remove people from the tag as necessary:

The smart tag condition would be similar to the above also:

However, you may consider this data too ephemeral to devote administrative time to, and so not identify these people at all.

Those who have home communions

Those who have home communions can be identified with a key date, the key date being added each time the person receives communion at home:

This key date can then be included in your Worshipping Community Smart Tag conditions:

In a similar way to those who are ill, you may also use a flow to manage home communion, and therefore could also use the "In flow" smart tag condition:

Those who are part of a regular "fresh expression" of church

For customers who use the Small Groups module to identify those part of a small group that's considered a regular "fresh expression" of church, you can use smart tag conditions to identify those who are part of specific small groups or clusters:

However, your definition of a regular "fresh expression" of church may differ from this, and so you would need to first define how you distinguish these - perhaps by a custom field, fixed tag or otherwise, and choosing the relevant smart tag condition for your Worshipping Community Smart Tag.

Those who live in care or residential homes

Again, these people can be identified by a fixed tag and subsequent Worshipping Community Smart Tag condition:

Alternatively, you could use a custom field to identify these people:

You may wish to make the custom field editable by contacts, so that your congregation can elect the answer to this question themselves, via My ChurchSuite or a consent request. You can then use a Smart Tag condition like this:

Those who give regularly to their church

For customers who use the Giving module, you can identify Address Book contacts who have given recently using a smart tag condition:

It's also important to remember that some of your givers may not be contacts in your Address Book. If this is the case, it may be that you wish to set up a separate smart tag in the Giving module to identify those people, so you can add that number to the number of people surfaced by your Address Book Worshipping Community Smart Tag:

For customers who do not use the Giving module, you may wish to add a fixed tag or custom field of "Regular Giver" for these people as mentioned above.

Those who lead worship

For customers who use the Rotas module, smart tag conditions can be added to your Worshipping Community Smart Tag to identify those in a relevant ministry or role:

For customers who do not use the rotas module, you may wish to add a fixed tag or custom field of "Leads Worship" for these people as mentioned above.

Bringing it all together

Ensure that your smart tag conditions are set to "Match any of the following", and that condition batches have OR selected, so as to identify anyone who fits any of the criteria, rather than all of the conditions:

You should now have a smart tag that encapsulates all of your adult Worshipping Community:

Children

For customers who use the Children module, and wish to also count children in your Worshipping Community numbers, you'll need to set up a Worshipping Community smart tag in the Children module also.

If you use Check-in to register and check-in children, the following smart tag condition can be used to identify children who attended a children's group:

If you don't use Check-in, you may wish to create a fixed tag or custom field to identify these children, as mentioned above.

For children who are ill and unable to come to church, are away on holiday, have home communions, who are part of a regular "fresh expression" of church, who live in care or residential homes and who lead worship, you can use the same smart tag conditions as contacts in the Address Book, as detailed above.

You may also wish to set up two additional Smart tags, allowing you to identify which children are in which age categories for your Worshipping Community tag:

Reporting on your Worshipping Community

Reporting on your Worshipping Community numbers is easy, with your Smart Tag(s) all set up, and our Tag Snapshot functionality.

Navigating to the Snapshots tab of a tag allows you to see the number of people who were in your tag on the 1st of each month, giving you an accurate history of your Worshipping Community numbers each month, along with details of the numerical change from the last month:

You can optionally add the Tag Snapshot widget to your dashboard, which also updates on the 1st of each month, allowing you to see at a glance your tag snapshots each time you log in:

You may also find the Demographics (Snapshot) report in the Address Book helpful, which allows you to select your adult Worshipping Community tag and view the demographics within that tag:

The Age demographic in this report is of course reliant on contacts having a date of birth assigned to them.

Finally, if you need to filter details for the people in your Worshipping Community tag, you can do this by clicking the Advanced Search filter at the top of your contact, children or giver list and selecting the relevant tag:

Lastly, remember that you may have multiple tags to combine the total numbers for - your Address Book Worshipping Community tag, your Children module Worshipping Community tag(s) and your unlinked recent givers tag in the Giving module.