23 May Analyzing Church Giving: Using Data to Understand and Grow Member Giving

Building and maintaining relationships with church members is fundamental to your mission. While you no doubt also have goals and vision beyond your church walls, the people who make up your church community largely are your mission. Their participation and spiritual wellbeing are central to your purpose.

That’s why data can be so useful in fostering member relationships. In small churches, members and givers may all be friends—personal acquaintances and neighbors. But in larger ministries, building, maintaining, and analyzing robust data is the only way to “know” members and givers, and steer the ship.

Your organization’s church administration or CRM software allows you to build a robust member database. Ideally, you have good information on members, including family member names, addresses, phone numbers, service attendance, volunteer roles, special event attendance, and more. Knowing where people’s individual interests lie and including those fields in your database is fertile soil. But cross-analyzing church giving data with member database information is where you can really learn a lot about how to grow participation and giving.

Ways to Leverage Giving Data

We recommend starting with your upcoming ministry goals. What do you hope to achieve? How do your goals break down into “buckets”—giving goal amounts by month, by event, by demographic, by fund? Are you hoping to raise the average giving amount per member, or are you hoping to add more giving members—or both?

Now take a look at the giving data you have collected in recent years. What are some ways you can parse this data to help you strategize meeting your programming goals?

Here are some suggested data analyses you could run:

• What is your average giving amount per church family per year? And what is the median?

• What is your average giving amount by member zip code per year? And what is the median?

• What is your average giving amount by giving mechanism (cash/check (in person or mailed), phone line, online portal, text giving) per year? And what is the median? Also, what is the frequency by mechanism?

• In the past year, what were your percentages of first-time or one-time givers vs. repeat givers?

• Which special calls for donations or initiatives were most effective in the past year or two, both in terms of total funds raised and number of givers engaged?

The answers to these questions may lead you to more questions. And of course, the possibilities for data analysis are endless—especially for enterprise organizations. We suggest you start with some basics and grow your understanding from there.

How We Can Help

Here at mobileAxept, we are text giving and text data experts. In addition to helping you surpass your fundraiser targets with our legendary text giving tool, we provide complimentary data consultations to all of our church clients. Our software has direct integration with many widely used church CRMs, and our reporting tools are simple yet robust and granular. We can assist you in finding ways to leverage and marry your CRM and giving data to better understand the hearts of your church members and the asks that might be most effective.

For more information or to get started, contact sales.