Sunday, September 25, 2016

4 Of The Primary Ways North Point Community Church Measures Success

Any regular reader of this site knows I am a raving fan of MAG Bookkeeping and their Fully-Engaged Podcast.  They recently hit a grand slam home run with one of their episodes.  Their guest was Clay Scroggins, one of the campus pastors for North Point Community Church.  MAG’s very own Ivy Sprague wrote an incredible recap which I want to share with you.  If you have not signed up for the Fully-Engaged Podcast, click HERE and do so now.  BTW, I will be an upcoming guest.
And if your church or business needs bookkeeping assistance, MAG is the best group available.  Click HERE to gather some initial information.  And now onto Ivy’s recap:
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North Point Ministries was founded by Andy Stanley in 1995 and now has six churches in the Atlanta Area, including North Point Community Church (NPCC). Clay Scroggins, our most recent podcast guest, is the lead pastor and leads the staff of NPCC in its day-to-day operations. Each week, more than 30,000 people attend services at the North Point Ministries churches.
It’s pretty clear then that North Point has seen a lot of success. Some of that success has been very natural and organic, but Clay says they also do a lot of work at it. For starters, they struggled with how and why to improve their online experience. Originally, as many churches do, they looked at people attending church online as competition. Wouldn’t they rather have them in church? But they worked hard to improve the online experience and now fully embrace it. As it has gotten better and better, those who attend online have actually become more and more engaged.
That takes us to another area they work hard on: engagement. The church experience — online and in person — has changed a lot in recent years, which means the definition of engagement has needed to change as well. Today, if someone is engaged with the church, that is a way that North Point defines success.
There are four levels of engagement they consider and measure:
  1. Is someone inviting other people?
  2. Are they serving?
  3. Are they in a group?
  4. Are they giving?
In regards to attending church online, someone may prefer that, but they may also be giving, serving and attending a group. So that person is very engaged. Hopefully the people who attend in-person are engaged in other ways as well.
With a church ministry this large, obviously North Point relies on volunteers to serve in many ways. This is true at many churches, but North Point has a very active evaluation process that Clay says involves reaching deep into the organization. They did a recent survey with classic questions about communication, connectedness, what people like the most/least, what could be improved, etc. Out of about 5,500 volunteers, they has around 1,900 respondents and about 5,000 write-in comments. Clay says they feel that surveys like this are very successful in helping them clearly know where and how they can improve.
Conducting surveys doesn’t just happen. It takes work, but the results are significant. A church won’t know much about its success unless it asks the hard questions, analyzes the results and moves forward with that knowledge as North Point does.
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