Monthly Archives: June 2007

UU Bloggers meet

Chris Walton, editor of the UU World magazine, and Deb Weiner, Director of Electronic Communications, both of the Unitarian Universalist Association, hosted a reception of Unitarian Universalist bloggers.

I was fascinated to hear about the different ways Unitarian Universalists (UUs) participate in the blogosphere — including writing a personal blog, writing a blog as a religious professional, political blogging, Live Journal blogging, and writing as a regular contributor for someone else’s blog.

Below you’ll find a list of the bloggers who showed up….

Continue reading →

Summer on the road

The drive up from New Bedford to Cambridge this afternoon was a real summer drive. The car was already hot from the sun. Driving with the windows rolled down didn’t cool it down much. Even though it wasn’t that hot today — only up in the eighties — I thought I could feel my head getting hot from the sun beating on the roof of the car. My shirt was damp with perspiration. I’m not used to the heat yet, and I swear I got a headache from the heat. But in a month or less, a day like today will seem cool and comfortable.

Social enterprise software

The Social Enterprise Alliance sells business plan software for non-profits that include earned income ventures:

Business Plan Pro-Social Enterprise Edition was developed in partnership with Palo Alto Software specifically for nonprofit organizations as an easy-to-use blueprint and interactive planning tool for successful earned income ventures.

The wizard-driven software produces a social enterprise plan that includes market analysis, strategy and implementation description, social return on investment, sales forecast, personnel plan, and financial statements.

Link.

(Not useful for most churches, I know, but I’m associated with a couple of organizations that might find this useful. Looks like it’s Windows-only.)

Summer in the city

Walking down the sidewalk on a hot summer you day, you see small red and black splotches. Look up: it’s a mulberry tree, and if you’re lucky there will be ripe mulberries within reach, and you can pop one in your mouth for a burst of tart and slightly foxy flavor.

But when I looked up, the only berries within reach were red or white, underripe. Higher up, out of reach, were the deep red and black mulberries. Someone had gotten to the tree before me.

General Assembly 30 sec. update #1

Tomorrow I’ll be on a plane headed to Portland, Oregon, to attend General Assembly, the big annual denominational gathering. I’m going to try to do thirty second updates each day of General Assembly, along with written posts. In this first update, I talk about how I hate traveling.



uuaga07

How big is our church?

It’s notoriously difficult to accurately measure how big a church is.

Official membership may be defined differently from one church to the next, thus not allowing accurate comparisons; criteria for what constitutes a member or standards for membership may vary widely not just from church to church, but over time within the same church; and membership can be affected by outside factors such as denominational dues being pegged to membership (which tends to lower the number of members counted). I believe official membership has an unacceptably high margin of error, perhaps as high as 50%, and so I tend to discount it as a useable metric.

Other measurements have been devised, and the most common in mainline and liberal Protestant congregations is “active membership.” Active membership is determined by counting the total number of people present in the building during weekend worship services each week, and taking the yearly average. Margin of error is usually under 10%, as long as records are taken every week. However, active membership does not count other people who might be active in the congregation, e.g., people who are active with the Women’s Alliance but who do not come to worship services regularly.

Given the often gross inaccuracies of these two methods of determining congregation size, my feeling is that we need additional metrics. Since congregational size is such a slippery concept, I suspect it is best determined by using several different metrics together.

One obvious additional metric might be to determine the number of volunteer hours people contribute to the congregation. This would take into account all the people who seem to feel that the church’s mission and goals are important enough that they are willing to devote their precious volunteer hours to the church — and it would include those who may not come to the worship service. It will be difficult to accurately measure volunteer hours, and the best we could hope for is an approximate measurement. However, it should be possible to come up with some basic techniques to make a reasonable estimate of volunteer hours, e.g., determining the number of people who volunteered in any capacity during the year, and estimating the average number of hours per volunteer. Even counting the number of volunteers alone would provide useful information.

Another obvious metric for determining church size is obvious:– determine the size and sources of operating budget. The size of the operating budget should tell us the potential impact the church could have on its members and on the wider community. We would also need to know the sources of the operating budget, broken down into member contributions, endowment income, rental income, and grants — a smaller percentage of operating budget coming from member income would most likely indicate low member commitment and/or fewer members.

One or two additional metrics would be very useful for those of us who want to take organizational development and growth seriously. It’s too easy to say, “Oh, there’s just such a good feeling around this church so we must be growing.” Good feelings are important, but in my experience there is not a strong correlation between good feelings and growth — good feelings may (or may not) be a necessary precondition for growth, but in most cases good feelings do not lead to or cause growth.