How do you measure success in a church outreach event?

Is it about the number of people who showed up? Is it about what a fantastic time they had at the event? Is it about how many volunteers you had show up to help and how many stayed around to help clean up? Though all of these things are important and satisfying when they happen,  in our churches we should always look beyond the immediate as we measure success.

As we head into fall, we need to review how we look at and evaluate success in church events. We need to look beyond initial attendance and evaluate church outreach events for lasting effectiveness, no matter how well it seemed we did at the event itself.  As you'll find, in this article, many of the things we think are successful aren't when looked at in how they impact long-term church growth.

A great turnout doesn't equal great results

I recently looked at a church website that celebrated the great success of their fall outreach from last year by listing the number of hot dogs served and ice cream bars 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.

This was a neighborhood church many people could walk to. Even with the most minimal advertising, it would have been difficult not to get a great turnout when they were giving away free food and ice cream.

To give away goodies is not the purpose of the church

The church exists is to fulfill the Great Commission—to introduce people to Jesus and to help them grow into mature disciples. An fun event and food give away might be the start of that process, but it won't be any more than that if you don't spend some time in prayer and careful strategic planning. The rest of the article will help you do that.

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Strategy and planning is not the most fun thing to do, but it is the most essential

You are not putting on the seasonal event for the sake of having a fun party. Your goal must be to begin a relationship with people that will grow your church and change lives. You want to represent Jesus so people will come to know him.

To help you plan for events coming up this fall, it can be helpful to look back at events from past years and honestly evaluate them. Following are some questions you need to discuss in your church staff meetings as you look to the future:

Event evaluation questions

• What made this church event different than 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 have done if we want to make an impact on our world. If your answers to the previous 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.

Effective communication suggestions for your fall and other outreach events

In church staff meetings 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's sad that we have to be reminded that our primary goal is evangelism, not just having a good time, but it seems like so many churches today focus so much on having a good time in the futile hope that if we show people how friendly Jesus is they will eventually get around to considering him as something more than the host of a party.

Such an attitude (and it is far more prevalent than we'd like to admit) is not worthy of you who have been called to fully fulfill the Great Commission. It is also not a professional way to use the people and resources that have been entrusted into your care.

Fortunately it isn't difficult to evaluate what works and what doesn't in outreach communications. Just as in a basketball game, it doesn't matter if you don't like the team colors or their strategy. Only one thing counts—the final score. There is a similar way to determine the success of church events.

To fully fulfill the Great Commission (which is what this ministry and website wants to help you do) here is a way to determine the score

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. It's not how many people had fun or not. If the goal of effective church communications is to fully fulfill the Great Commission, the measure of success is whether this goal is being fulfilled or not.

Remember at a basketball game the success of the team is not determined by how many hot dogs were sold or how many people filled the stands—it's who won, who had the highest score.

We evaluate success in church events in a similar way as we do in basketball—we look at the score and in the church that score is dependent upon how well we fulfill the Great Commission.

To determine our our score in fully fulfilling the Great Commission we need to look at two actions we can count:

1. The people who come to know Jesus as Savior, in a word: salvation.

2. The people who grow to maturity in their faith and become disciples, in a word: discipleship.

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.  You can't start either one of the processes of either salvation or discipleship until people show up.

What is the attendance score at your event?

The attendance 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?

Making up a simple chart of what you did to promote an event and then the results of it moves discussions of church effectiveness away from personal opinion to objective numbers.

The simple numbers of how many new people attend the church event, 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 individuals 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 currently attending the church really like to put on the events. To determine 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? What did it cost and what was your return on investment in the lives of people?

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

Even without tracking it, if you know the answer is something along the lines of “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 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 in reality we simply didn’t advertise it very well.

Honest evaluation can also keep us from false excuses. You can create many communication pieces today for little or no cost and that will keep you from the current popular excuse for not advertising church events which 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.

In print marketing, I'm encouraging churches to look at publication techniques such as digital duplicators which enable you to create communication pieces for a fraction of the cost of color copiers. Print is still one of our most powerful communication tools and equipping your people with inexpensive printed invitations can be one of your most powerful tools.

Finally, it's too important not to be honest

The eternal destiny of people is what is at stake as you plan your outreach events. In addition, the temporal growth of your church and all the spiritual and emotional benefits it can provide to the people who become part of it are important considerations.

In addition, putting on special events is a lot of work and usually costs quite a bit of money. If you take the time to carefully plan and then commit to honestly measure the results all the hard work and money will be worth it.