RX 24 - Engagement - Strategies for Tracking and Taking Action - Brandi Myszkowski

Transcribed Content

But let's give a warm welcome to Sina and Brandy. Hi, guys. I am Brandy, and I'm so thankful for you guys, being here. And I have been with Christ Fellowship for about seven years. I came from the secular world, but I am the director of application development, and I've been in that role for the past twenty years at least. So I love what I get to do now, especially because it has to do with furthering the kingdom. So it's way better than me in the secular world doing this job. And I get to be with all you guys every year, so I love that. I'm actually from Arizona, but so I get to come to my homeland whenever we have Frog Conference. But I do live in sunny South Florida, and fun fact, I love to go fishing and boating with my husband. And I have a 17 year old and three two dogs. Nice. Three dogs. Two dogs. And I get to do it with my partner in crime here, Sina. Hi, everyone. Okay. So, yeah, I'm Sina. I'm the application support manager at Christ Fellowship Church. I've been on staff there for nineteen years and in the apps world for eight. Definitely found my sweet spot there. I love it so much. Love what I do. Love who I get to do it with. Fun facts for me, I love backpacking, going if you were in the last session, you heard this, going at the end of the this month back to the Appalachian Trail doing 75 miles. I love quilting, and I'm learning German for a trip to Europe next year, so for fun. And SQL. I'm learning SQL. It's not as much fun. Duolingo hasn't quite figured out how to do that, but she's a good teacher too. All right. So today, we're going to talk about engagement and strategies for tracking and taking action. So I'm going say right now, we're piloting this. We've been looking at this for over a year now. We do not have it right. But we're working we're working to get there. We have a lot of great inspiration from our other partner churches. We love Life Church, NewSpring, LCBC, Church of the Highlands. Like, we are really learning from all of you guys. So some of this stuff, we were inspired by you guys that started it. So Amber Smart, who's amazing, you guys may have seen this particular image, this Venn diagram. Amber Smart was able to create this for us in Tableau. But it was one way that we were going to start looking at our engagement, and we're going get into that. So smart metrics. Smart metrics. Back there in the corner. So what is engagement? So the dictionary says engagement is the action of engaging or being engaged. Like to be married? Maybe. You you can be getting engaged. Yeah. But we like to refer to engagement as an individual's identifiable actions that they are taking in the church. And even more so, engagement is the measurable actions supporting spiritual growth. Alright. So why is engagement important? Why is tracking it important? We really want to understand members' involvement. If we can understand what people are doing and what they're not doing, that's important. Also, average attendance is showing that families only attend once a month. We actually have proof that that's true. And understanding the actual number of people in your church that you're actually caring for is a lot different than what we see on a on on any given Sunday or Wednesday or whatever that is. For example, our student team, like, on on a Wednesday, they are caring for 505 students. But if that student's only attending once a month, they're really caring for 2,000 students. So we need to make sure we're equipping our ministries to actually care for the real number of people they are caring for. So that's a big reason why it's so important. And, also, we wanna be able to identify opportunities to deepen their discipleship. So next steps for people. We always want next steps. Yeah. So here's the attendance analytics that we pulled from Rock that show, basically, if you look at the two highlighted areas and see well, not the two highlighted areas. Look at the top. There's out of 69,802 attendances, 44444% of people came just once a month. You can see that slow attrition as you increase that number of attendance counts. So only 16% came every week in the month for four weeks of the month, and that's probably our staff kids, we think. We're not sure. It's probably a lot of staff or high level volunteers that are doing that. Exactly. And we had a few outliers. Some of that is due to demographics. We are the retirement capital. So we have some locations that don't really have a lot of young kids, so it's harder to track. Basically, this is to track overall trends from the church throughout by using attendance. Great. So segments of engagement. So I'm gonna refer to things as segments and traits, and then we actually have trackable actions. So this Venn diagram is showing you're exploring, growing, and contributing. So the outside, bigger circles, and we'll we'll dive into what each one of those actually means, what those trackable actions are or traits. And then you can see where they overlap. So we've got consumer consistent and connected and then fully engaged in the very center. So I loved this visualization. Our leadership team did not so much. They were like, I don't get it. And I kind of understand why they didn't get it because it doesn't show nothing's linear. You can't actually see what's big or small. You I mean, you can tell by the percentages, but so we had to change that around, and we'll get there. Yeah. So the exploring track. This is, a really low bar. All you really have to do is watch a sermon online. If you've logged into our app, you're considered exploring. If you open an email, you're considered exploring because it means you're interested in the things that we are sending you, the content we're sending you. So checking in kids or submitting a prayer request, signing up for something, sending a keyword text to us, or if they're new to Rock, they come in with an exploring trait. Yes. So the other thing I want to just say about this too is we're tracking this on a monthly basis. So we're tracking this every month. So in the month of July, these were the things you would have to be doing to be considered exploring. And you really only have to do one of them to be considered exploring. That's good. You wanna go? Growing. Growing. These are people who are engaged in more of our discipleship processes. They're active in a life where they're taking a class, getting baptized. Journey is our membership class. Maybe they got saved or and they're looking at our daily devotion in our app. These are people who are actively pursuing spiritual growth, so that's our growing track. And because we're tracking this by month, you'd have to be getting baptized that month to be in this growing or active in a group or a class this month. So made a decision this month. If you made it last month, but you're not doing anything else, it's not counted as growing. And finally, contributing. So this is giving, going to mission trips, serving on our dream team, or serving at events. You would be considered in the contributing. And again, you only have to be doing one of these. So you could be giving and not serving or serving and not giving, vice versa. Yeah. They're just pouring into the church. They're pouring back into it, contributing. That's good. So this is a view that really helped our leadership team go, ah, I get it. So this is our whole database, this number. Sina likes the unicorn. Yeah, we got the unicorn. I like the Venn diagram too, but I like the unicorn. So only 2% of our whole entire database is considered fully engaged. That means they're doing all three, at least one trackable item in all three traits. Yeah. And then two traits, that's going to be one of or two of either of those growing, contributing, or exploring. As long as they're doing two of those, we've got 4% in grouping. And I'll just say the dotted the little dotted line represents our average weekend attendance. So that was pretty shocking to our leadership team. They're like, oh my goodness. We're like barely scratching the surface. It's like we could have also done this as an iceberg. Yeah. That's what I kept saying. It's too an iceberg. It's an iceberg, yeah. So 11% is doing at least one trait in the last month out of all of those. So they're either exploring, growing, or contributing. And the big number, 19%, is completely unengaged. They're active, but they are not doing anything trackable in the last month. No trackable items. Inactive? Inactive. Okay. So we've been in ROC a while now, and we have a lot of inactive records that happen over time. One of the things that we did recently was we tightened up our parameters around who we inactivate, and that came in conjunction with the deliverability policies put out by Google and Yahoo because we wanted to make sure we weren't sending emails to people who didn't actually want them because we didn't want to get blacklisted. So we tightened that inactive parameter to you have to have done something in the last six months from eighteen months. So we had eighteen months. That was a win for a lot of reasons. We reactivate them just as quickly as we inactivate them. So we're very proactive in reactivating people. But our communications and marketing team loved it because all of our open rates went way up because we're actually communicating to the people who want to hear from us. Was a big win My point. Big win for us. So now let's just focus on that top half of the iceberg or the pyramid. The pyramid. So we're taking out the inactives now. So now we're just looking at one month worth of data without that big 65% of inactive. And it's a little bit better. 4% are unicorns. The three traits they're doing, they're like the perfect disciple. Two traits, 9%, and one trait, 27%. The unengaged is 59%. So these are people who are sitting in the back corner of your sanctuary who are not doing anything but still really need to be cared for. And one percent went inactive. This was actually in the month of June. So one percent of our population went inactive in the month of June out of this whole And there's always some caveats to the data. Unengaged, during the summer, we don't have a ton of classes going on. So we're more likely to have a higher level of unengaged people versus in the fall when all of our classes ramp up. Yep. Okay. So now we're going to get into tracking the movement of people. So like I said, we've been doing this for we've been tracking this specifically since May of twenty twenty three. So we have over a year's worth of historical data now, and we keep it so that we can actually report on it going forward. And we do it by person, person by person. And this has really been helpful to us because we can see month over month like, really cool story that I have is Regina. Regina started attending our Jupiter location in October of twenty twenty three, and she was immediately in that exploring category. In November, she signed up to get baptized, which put her in the growing category. And as part of that process, our connections team actually reaches out to people who sign up for baptism. Right. You can't just sign up and get baptized. There's a pastoral process to make sure they understand the decision they're making and can articulate that. So there's pastoral conversations that happen before people get baptized. So Trevor, who's our connections guy at Jupiter, he was reaching out to Regina and not having any luck getting ahold of her. And we reach out three or four times, and then we close out that connection request and and call it inactive, that connection request for Regina. So by November, she was no longer growing. She was now exploring again. And by December, she was unengaged. She did not get baptized. And in January, she was also unengaged. But in February, she received an email about a sisterhood hang at the beach. Sisterhood is our women's ministry. We like to have sisterhood hangs at least once a quarter, and Regina opened that email, and she read it. She was put it back into exploring because she opened that email. She went to the event, and I'm I'm gonna tell you, March, she became growing because she signed up and joined a sisterhood group. She switched her campuses. She went to our she started coming to our Gardens campus, and she has been in that growing category ever since because she's part of a sisterhood group now. When I was, like, doing the research around all of this engagement, I went and looked at her account and, like, looked at every like, all the things that had happened. And when she signed up to get baptized, she had a she put a comment that, like, this was a huge step for her and that she's an introvert. Like, she it was very brave thing for her to do. And she's a young adult and an introvert based on what I've read. And one of the things that we learned from this is a man was calling her. A man was texting her. That might not necessarily always be the best thing. Maybe, just maybe, if a sister would have called her, she would have answered that phone and she would have gotten baptized. So it was just something that we've learned and she still hasn't gotten baptized. I checked right before our meeting. She hasn't gotten baptized, but she is part of a sisterhood group. And we're believing for that. Yes, and we are praying for Regina. She's been on my laptop now for since May. I've had her here because I started digging into this stuff. So that's why it's really important to track this stuff. And to glean best practices and share them. Yeah. So tracking the movement. So this is just six months, the last six months' worth of stuff that we've been tracking. So you can see the highlighted yellow is obviously January, February was when we inactivated all of the people between that six and eighteen month mark. It was a lot of people that we inactivated at that point. But that was the Google email deliverability act thing. But you can see our unengaged, our not engaged number, it's actually grown quite a bit. 57% in May, '50 '9 percent in June, '50 '2 percent in July. That's not good. So this data has really enabled us and has prompted our senior leadership team to really attack the pyramid. That is what they've called this project now, attack the pyramid. And our overall objective is to move the unengaged to engaged, obviously. In our approach, we really wanted to create personalized communication, and we wanted to target specific invitations and remove barriers for people. And we also wanted to provide clear next steps. Yeah. What I love about this is a lot of times we get great data. Data is so readily available. Then what do you do with the data? Now what's our next step? So I love that we are piloting processes, and we know God works in them as we put our blood and sweat and tears in it. It's all him, but we get to help and water. So we did three campaigns. We did a call campaign with some of our smaller campuses that could manage calling some of their unengaged. So these are people, you can read it, but it's they've had in April, they had two or more traits. They could have been fully engaged or they could have had two of those three traits in April, but then they went to zero traits both for May and June, so two months of nothing. So we figured out who those were and we did campaigns. So we created connection requests for the call campaign over five of our campuses. We trained a select group of staff. Some of them were kids directors, some of them were connection students. The campus pastor really wanted to handpick who would go to who, and so that's what they did. And the campus pastors did too. Yes. Made phone calls. Everybody leaned in to make this happen, And we worked with our connections team to come up with a couple different prompts of how to get those conversations started and how to lean into those conversations. And it always started with an actual phone call, and then they could follow-up with texts and leave messages. We know in this day and age, people don't answer phone calls. So we still made the phone call. We left a voicemail and followed it up with a text. And we generally call back and get the people to answer the phone the second time. So it worked really well. This so I'm gonna read this. I need my glasses to read this. Sina's got a couple stories too, but this is an actual person. We called our one of our campus pastors called, left a message, and then followed it up with a text, and we got a text reply the next day from this individual. I am so happy to hear from you. I would love for you to pray for me partly because of my health. I have found myself struggling with guilt for things that I could have done, should have done, and did do, etcetera. I have had very deep conversations with God asking for direction. Two times in the past four days, he has provided an answer, and your text was one of those answers. I'm truly blessed. And our campus pastor sent a text message back saying that they were praying for him, And then she called, and Debbie answered the phone. And she told our campus pastor that she's gonna come back on Sunday, August 4, and is bringing a coworker and her coworker's friend family with her. And Debbie's excited to get more involved and says that the text message she sent her was truly an answer to prayer. So she's gonna jump into the journey. She's ready for the freedom study, and she's ready to start serving. And it took just a small effort to make a phone call and send a text message. And now Debbie's life is changed. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. There was a guy who was one of our unicorns that he had all three traits going back in April and then nothing, nothing, nothing, right? And when one of our team members called him, they found out that he was actually going through a divorce and he had had some severe health issues. This is a man who was really in need of some shepherding and some pastoring and care and we and having that comp starting that conversation allowed us to come around him at a point of need in his life and be the church, which is what we're all trying to do. And and then there is another what's the other story? Oh, I love this story. There is a lady who was in the same boat. She was unengaged. We don't really know why, but she works at the school district, and she was just in the process of saying to another staff member, we just need to get prayer back in school. And then here comes our person calling and saying, hey, how can we pray for you today? And she was so blessed and so overwhelmed and so proud to be a part of a church that would call and ask that question. So those some great stories. There's more. We've got lots of stories. It's fun to read them. Yeah, that was like the best part is actually going through the results and actually reading the notes and stuff. It was awesome. So email campaign. This was another one of our pilots. And we took our three largest campuses. The call campaign, it was 117 people across five locations. So it was not a lot of work to put on the campus teams. The email, it was three eighty five people that fell into this bucket. And so that would have been quite a lot for our large campuses. They're pretty busy. And so we sent an email with a link to complete a survey. And it wasn't just a survey. It was like, hey, we really want to hear from you. Like, how can we improve? Like, what can we do for you this fall in our next series that we're getting ready to start? Like, how can we make it more impactful to you and your family? And we also asked for prayer. And, Cena, you guys also created a connection request for this. We did. So the survey was actually a workflow so we could capture a lot of information that we wanted to report upon. And I think you have the survey, right? Oh, yeah. So there's just the example of the survey. We're asking kind of what kind of content are they think we should do, and there are already things we were planning on doing, I think. They were. So it was really to see what kind of a reaction we would get. And then we also, of course, included, hey, how can we pray for you? Because that was really what we were hoping to get a response on. Yep. All right. And then the last test pilot that we did was SMS conversations, and this was seventy seventy seven people. And we just worked with our connections team. We used SMS conversations. Our central core team actually did it and did it from each one of our campus locations of the six that we did it with. Megan did it, but she texted as Monique from Stuart. And we didn't wanna put extra work on anyone for this. But this is just an example of one of the text messages. It was very simple. Hey, Joanne. This is Monique from Christ Fellowship Stuart. Just checking in to see how you were doing and if there's anything we could pray for you about. And Joanne replied, thank you for checking in with me. We are in Colorado until November. We will check-in with you for opportunities in the church when we arrive back in Florida. Thank you for checking in on me and my family. We are doing fine and are so blessed to be healthy. So she's out of town. Snowbird capital of the world too. That's us. Well, Arizona is too, I think. I think it's a competition. Oh, okay. So we had lots of replies like this in text messages as well. So that went really well. Who won? Well Who do you think? Calls actually got the gold star. So 7% went back from zero traits to two traits. 79, one trait, and 11% remained unengaged. And they just didn't reply. They didn't answer the phone call, the text. We we didn't. Some of them, we might not have had a good phone number on file. And 4% actually became inactive. And because we talked to them, they told us they moved and they're attending another church or or whatnot. So we actually got really good information out of that. Emails, we got that same 7%, two traits. And we got 52%, one trait. I will remind you that opening an email is one of the things that puts you back in that exploring category. But we know they're alive, and we know they care about our content because they opened the email from us. If you didn't care about Christ Fellowship, you wouldn't read the emails. You'd delete them, move them to spam, unsubscribe, do whatever. These people actually opened the email. And 41% remained unengaged. They didn't open the email. They didn't they probably moved it to spam. Who knows? And the survey, what did what were the results? So I will tell you, out of 385 emails, only seven people replied. So some of these people who got these two traits, they might have organically done that. It might not have been those seven people. Actually, one of those seven people told us they moved away and were attending another church. So it should show inactive, but it it was such a small percentage that one person out of 385, it doesn't even show up here. And last but not least, text. Text gets a little gold star because they got 8%, fifty one % came back to one trait, and thirty seven percent remained unengaged. But we actually had conversations with people. It wasn't just they opened an email. So they get a gold star for that effort. All right, our next steps. I need my glasses again. So we this is literally being reviewed with our senior leadership team today. I'm bummed that I'm not in the room because I'm here, but I'm glad that I'm here with you guys going over it. And they are seeing the same presentation, basically. But what I hope our next steps come out of that meeting is that we ultimately will be able to continue connection requests. But we really wanna look at ways to reduce friction for our staff and our campus pastors because, obviously, calls were really effective. So how do we reduce the friction to make that easier for them to work those connection requests? One of the things we are planning to do is the Rock Mobile staff app. Life we can thank Life Church for that. They went ahead of us and got those connection requests in the staff app in Rock Mobile. We also want to introduce a person summary. Life Church also gave us this idea. They've used AI to gather all the information together on a person and have it on, like, one place, one stop shop. And we also want to be able to provide personalized next steps for people. We also want to look at how many people in here have some sort of lapsed donor connection? It's too late. So I am actually proposing that we get rid of the lapsed donor and focus all of our work on the unengaged before they become lapsed. When you when you stop giving, you're done. If you've just stopped attending a group or something's like, maybe there's something else going on, and and it's it's not just about giving. It's about spiritual growth and discipleship. So I think we can care for people a lot sooner than when they stop giving. That's too late in my mind. Obviously, we want to continue the pilot. We want to continue exploring how people who are engaged, engagement, how we can make more unicorn disciples. New catchphrase, make more unicorn disciples. Unicorn disciples. I don't think those two things actually go together, but Your ship's not going to go for that. They want to attack the pyramid, so why can't you have a unicorn at the top of it? So we definitely want to be able to have more things for people to engage with in off season. So we run groups and classes by semester, and we saw that in the summer, we got a lot of unengaged people. So we really want to be able to have people more engaged throughout the whole year. That's because all of our staff are doing camps. Yes, camps. We are doing a lot of camps. So that's it. That's it. Time for questions.