The Eclectic Cleric: "Congregations Count"
In the "Shameless Promotion" department...
I just discovered the above link, which is a review of my General Assembly Workshop, "Congregations Count" about using process data to better direct membership efforts. This person does an excellent job of describing the workshop, and more importantly has some great additional insight into what this work is about. I have had good response on the workshop, which has been presented a number of times (including a couple of conference call workshops). I have a standard request at the end of each workshop: send me your data so I can refine the ranges for the benchmarks, which will make the concepts more useful for everyone. At GA I gave out 30 CDs, with the caveat that the takers would provide me their data - so far, zero.
Check out the Eclectic Cleric's post, and if you want to hear/see the presentation, go to Congregations Count where you can download both the presentation and the audio of me presenting it (which includes a lot of material not on the slides). And send me your data!
1 comment:
Hi Linda. Surprised and strangely delighted that you found my old post summarizing your excellent GA presentation. I hope my rapidly scribbled notes weren't too off base. Here at the First Parish in Portland (Maine, not Oregon) we are working very hard to re-tool our Path to Membership strategies around your benchmarking process. It's still a little early in the game for us to have established really solid numbers yet, but I'll be happy to send them to you when we do. I was NOT one of the people who took a CD, but if there are any extras sitting around your office I'd be very grateful to have one of those as well.
I was ordained to the UU ministry at the age of 24 (so obviously I don't have your business and marketing background) but I have literally been doing this work half my lifetime now (including a stint as a New Congregation organizer, and a long tour of duty as a "consulting minister" to small, lay-led congregations hoping to grow while I was working on my PhD); I've seen a lot of membership growth presentations in my day, and yours was top notch -- it integrates the best of the proven outreach tactics we've used in the past, and then gives us a simple and relatively straightforward means both to measure our progress, and to set meaningful targets for improvement.
I hope my little summary will be useful in helping folks to understand how the process works (I wrote it originally for MY Membership Committee for just that purpose), and will look forward to any "coaching" you may be able to give us.
Tim Jensen
Portland Maine
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