Blog Post

Measuring Visitor Assimilation

  • By Rob Bourgeois
  • 09 May, 2018

How effective is your church at retaining new visitors?

Do you know if your church is retaining enough new visitors to grow?   In a book by Nelson Searcy and Jennifer Dykes Henson titled “Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully Enhanced Members of your Church”, they define a method for measuring visitor assimilation.   Their calculation takes the net change in attendance between a chosen month in the past year and the same month one year earlier.  The net gain is then divided by the new visitors in that year to create an assimilation rate.

Searcy and Henson explain that a church needs an assimilation rate of 3% (1 in 33 visitors) to maintain itself; a rate of 5% (1 in 20 visitors) to produce steady growth; and a rate of 7% (1 in 14 visitors) to produce rapid growth.

In our experience with church data, we found that looking at a specific month can create large swings in assimilation rates even though the same month is being compared across years. This can be caused when holidays fall in different months (Easter in March vs April) or when an event brings in an exceptionally high number of visitors in a particular week of only one year.  To level out the exceptional weeks, we changed the formula slightly to compare the average attendance for the year (rolling back from today) vs the prior year.

If your church captures new visitors and attendance (either individual attendance or headcount), we can load and model your data in Power BI to produce your assimilation rate on an ongoing basis.

Visit our samples page http://www.r2logic.net/power-bi-samples to see what else we can do to help you measure the effectiveness of your ministry and programs, effectively connect with visitors/members, and make more informed ministry/business decisions.
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We believe churches need better information and tools to gain insight about  who they are, what they do well, and where they can improve.  Our Power BI solutions use a church's existing data sources to feed cloud-based dashboards and interactive visuals.  Power BI can extract and transform data from almost any source, including databases, reports, spreadsheets and files.  Reports and dashboards are presented in a graphical form and can be accessed online (via a secure login) or can be printed.  Because the data can be 'sliced-and-diced' using interactive graphs and selectors, each report can provide the equivalent of hundreds of 'standard report' combinations.  Decision makers have information readily available at their fingertips, and they can drill down into specific details  without requesting a different report each time a new question arises. 

Do you wish you had a simple way to monitor,  measure, and improve  your church management?  We can help. Let us help you unlock the information  stored in Fellowship One, Shelby, ParishSoft or any other church management system.  Check out our sample solutions to get an idea of what can be done.  
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