TRACKING: The Missing Link in Catholic Parishes - Ep. 190

On this episode, I discuss why and how parishes can track their metrics and review them each week. I hope you enjoy and subscribe.

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Transcript

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Parishes need to start tracking their numbers. The majority of parishes that I talk to and help have no numbers when it comes to super important things. For example, if we think of any organization, there's three levels to its, it's essentially like it's functioning. You have, and it's shaped like a funnel. You have the top of the funnel, which is outreach, get new people in your ecosystem. The middle of funnel is nurture. That's what you do to get people to know like and trust you so that they buy or attend or do whatever it is the organization wants people to do. And then the bottom of the funnel is the doing. Are people coming to the organization's events or buying the products or receiving the services and all of that? All of that is just one big system, but there is tracking that needs to be done so you can figure out where to focus your attention. Because here's the thing: every organization has that three-part funnel. And if you don't track the numbers, you'll never figure out where the highest constraint is. See, every organization is like a flower. It wants to grow, it wants to be bigger. But it's blocked off somewhere. There's a constraint somewhere, and you need to find that constraint and relieve the constraint so it can grow. Now, you don't have to go and focus on the biggest constraint, but to me, that's very imprudent. That means you're now spending time working in a non-efficient way. And there's nothing prudent about that. It wastes time, it wastes resources, um, it wastes energy, it wastes people's resources too. So, especially for something like a church where the resources are given to you, right? You didn't earn them, so to speak, in the sense people like donated it out of charity and were not trying to reach the pastor's vision in the most efficient way. To me, that is imprudent. Okay. The only way to figure out where your highest constraints are is with tracking. And when I talk to parishes on the phone, I'll say, okay, how many young people? Um, yeah, how many average mass attendees do you have? One of the biggest metrics for every parish to know. They don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. It'd be hard to track. It's like, oh, okay, so we're already giving up. Be hard to track. What about how many new young adults are coming to mass every month? Outreach. Very typical outreach number to track. We don't know. We're not tracking that. Okay. Gosh. How good is the bulletin? How many bulletin hand raises do we get? When people read the bulletin, how often do they look at a flyer and want to take the next step? I don't know. We're not tracking that. Okay. So we're essentially, most parishes are essentially not tracking their outreach, like how they're getting new people into their ecosystem. They're not tracking the middle of a funnel, which is the bulletin. Like how many people are becoming interested in things and wanting more information about things, this event or becoming an altar server. Are we tracking any of that? No. And then you're not tracking the big attendance things like average mass attendance. So zero tracking for an organization. That organization will fail given enough time. Because how do you know what to focus on? You sit down Monday morning. Let's say you've got 10 hours of time in the week to focus on improving the organization, working on the business instead of in it, so to speak. I'm sure you've heard that. So outside of you know giving the sacraments and meeting with the parishioners, let's say you have 10 hours to allocate towards working on the parish instead of in it. What are you gonna work on? Well, you're just gonna shoot from the hip. You're gonna do whatever feels good, whatever's easy, whatever you think is the most highest leveraged task to execute, but you don't know because you don't have the numbers. And so you have to track. Every time you're implementing something, you have to track. Okay. We'll start with the bulletin tracking, because this is something every church has. They have a bulletin, not every church has an outreach system. But for the bulletin, they have a QR code that goes to a form for all the things in the bulletin. So there's three flyers for events. You've got a bake sale, a Bible study, and you've got a talk from a visiting priest. Cool. Those are coming up in the next month. And then for volunteering, you've got ultra server, choir, catechists. Cool. Those are the things you need. There are there's one QR code in the bulletin. All of those flyers at the end, the CTA call to action is scan the QR code for next steps or to learn more. Scan the QR code to learn more and get to the next steps. Okay. So there's one big QR code on each page. It's all the same QR code, it's all going to the same place. They scan that. After they scan that, they get taken to a Google form. Google form is free. Okay. I'm literally giving you a free solution. The Google form says, what are you interested in? It's either attending an event, volunteering for a role. They click the thing that they're interested in. They get to just check the box. Cool. They put their name and email in, they click submit. The thank you page says, awesome. The parish will reach out shortly, within 24 hours, to send you them additional information to learn more. Now you might think, okay, but Joe, we could have just put all this information in the flyer, but then you don't get the tracking. You don't know who is interested. You have no idea how well the bulletin is working or how well the flyers are working or what people are genuinely interested in. You might have a flyer that got asked for to learn more by 25 people. The other one got two people. It's like, okay, well, we should run that event more often. People are interested in that. See, you get the tracking. Ah, okay. So you're not done yet, though. You get all this info. You still have to send them the information. If they're wanting to be an usher, you have to send, you have to connect them with the team lead of the ushers or whatever, or if they want to be a lecturer. You got to connect them to that guy. So anyway, all of the Google forms. Google has a native integration with Google Sheets. So it just automatically fills up a Google Sheet. Perfect. You have a little table. You auto filter the table so that there's different views. One is for events. So remember, they got to choose in the beginning: do they want an event or do they want to volunteer for a role? People that it fill have it filter for events. You see all the people, all their emails, and all the events they want to attend. The admin sends those emails, they puts those emails on the guest list for the calendar event, for the whatever event it is, right? So if it's a bake sale and it's 9 a.m. on Saturday, you put that in the parish Google calendar, the event, invite guests, put all those emails, and then put a description in the in the message that says, like, hi, thank you so much for wanting to learn more. Here's the calendar invite. We put the info in the description. See you there. Boom. That's what people want when it comes to an event. They just want it on their calendar so they don't have to think about anything anymore. And then when it comes to volunteering, have a view for the volunteering and connect them with the team lead. The emails should do three-way connections with the team leads. So if it's they want to join the choir, they get an email, a three-way text or a three-way email with the uh music director. So stuff like that. That sounded like a lot. I built the template. So if you guys want them, just text me or message me or whatever. And I have them. Um so anyway, the key there though, the key is that the parish now has tracking in MOF in middle of funnel. Right? Everyone shows up to mass, they're reading stuff, they're like, oh, this sounds interesting. Middle of funnel deals with hand raises. A little hand raise, like, oh, I'd like to learn more. I'd like to maybe do this, I'd like to do that. You need to track that. You have no idea what people are interested in. I mean, think of that. Think of writing an organization where you post about a thing you're doing and you just hope for the best. No, there's no data. That's a little extra work for the admin, but you can do it in like 10 minutes. It's not that bad. Because it's all it's all already pretty much done. You just copy all the emails, put them into the Google event, you're done. So, anyway, that's tracking for middle of funnel. Guess what I would do? Social media is middle of funnel as well. Organic social media, posting on the Facebook page and the Instagram page, not ads, that's top of funnel, but um middle of funnel. Anyway, how do you track for organic? Well, let's say I post on the story. Base sale this weekend, 9 a.m. Interested? Click the link to get a friendly reminder. The link goes to the same Google form. Now, you could also include a question like, where did you hear about this? Social media or the Sunday bulletin. That's what we do. But it goes to the same form, same thing. The admin can then send the info within 24 hours. And it's just, it's always so clean and you get trackability. And then at the end of the month, you can say, okay, 200 people raised their hand this month. 180 of them came from the bulletin, 20 of them came from social media. And 70% of those hand raises were for the talk with Father John. So clearly, people really wanted that. You know, you just start to get data. It's so important. And don't tell me, like, well, that sounds too tough. That's not going to work for us. Yes, it will. You can do other tracking things if you want. For example, a contact card at mass and then count the number of contact cards. But what you really want to do is the QR code because it guides them exactly, they get to tell you exactly what they want more information for, and that the data logging is automatic. It's saying that the emails isn't, but the data logging is, and that's that's valuable. And it's all free. It's all free. I'm not asking you to buy fancy software. Google Calendar is free, Google Forms is free, Google Sheets is free. So guys, track. I can always tell the quality of a system by how well it's tracked. If you tell me, gosh, we just can't reach young people. I just I don't get it. There's no young adults coming to Mass. I'd be like, show me your outreach system and then they'll show me the numbers. And most parents just go, outreach system, numbers? What are you talking about? I just celebrate mass and just hope people show up. It's like, well, that's why we're failing. So you got more to do. That's okay. It's just work. We're men. We're made to work. But you can delegate it. And I just did an episode on speed, speed to implementation. So we're gonna teach our staff, we're gonna train our staff. We take a lot of prudence in decision making. But once the decision is made, we are very quick to implement. So that will save time. It's just there's so much. But anyway, the core of this episode is to track your numbers. And you don't just track for the sake of tracking, you do a weekly scorecard of like five to six numbers. Easy in a Google spreadsheet. Super simple to look at, it's super easy to fill out. So you just get a snapshot every week. A couple of the numbers are from top of funnel, a couple of the numbers are from bottom of funnel, a couple of numbers are from uh middle of funnel. So you can see it's like okay, we had 20, or let's say we had 10 people who are interested in coming to mass for the first time. Four new people came to mass this week. Those are your two top of funnel metrics. And middle of funnel are like we had 35 bulletin hand raises last week, and we had 15 people interested in events from Instagram, the Instagram, social media, whatever. And then the bottom of the funnel are average mass attendees and weekly collections. So you you just get like a snapshot. So, okay, well, you can tell then, at least at a high level, where the constraint is. Okay. All right. I hope this was helpful. Scorecards, tracking, implemented systems, all very important. If you have value, drop a like. I will see you all in the next episode. Thank you. God bless.