How Should You React to Dips and Peaks in Church Online Attendance?

There are so many questions when it comes to success of online ministry.

• What data points should I look at?
• How do I know if I’m heading in the right direction?
• Is what I’m doing actually effective?

We aren’t in online ministry to just grow numbers; we know each number represents a person God loves. And we want to make sure we’re being as effective as we can be as we steward the technology God has given us.

To do that, we have to make sure we’re tracking data and using that data to ask the right questions.

Life.Church Online Pastor Alan George shares some thoughts about online church attendance.

Understanding Dips and Peaks in Attendance

1. Capture data. To understand dips and peaks in attendance, you first have to know what your church online goal is and identify the data you need to track.
   
   For example: If your goal for the week is to increase attenders, you’ll want to closely watch attendance numbers and how attenders came to your service.
   
   If your goal is leading people to join small groups, you’ll want to track how many people clicked to signed up to join an online small group, the number of people who complete the form, and the number of people who actually come to the group.
   
2. Ask questions. Once you have the data, start asking more questions. Going back to the example of attendance, if your goal is to increase attendance and your attendance actually decreased, asking the right questions will help you determine why.

• What was different this week and could it have impacted attendance? 
  • Did we have any technical issues?
  • Did our physical location open back up?
  • Was it a holiday or good/bad weather?
    
• Does this week’s attendance follow our typical trend or is it what we expected to see? Is this attendance consistent with what we have seen in the past?
  
• Did something in our communication strategy change?

Start making tweaks based on your data and the questions you asked to create a more effective online strategy.

If you use the Church Online Platform, you have access to analytics that allow you to see important areas for engagement in your service.