Introduction
GHC Trends is a powerful tool that tracks health measures over time. This is different to the standard dashboards which takes a snapshot at any given time. This means trends can track how member and health measures move over time to give you deeper insight into the health and growth of your church.
Members Added In the Last Year
Members Added:
- Our stay ratio measures how many of the new people added in the last year became a member.
- Trends has the ability to look at all people who became members in the last year. For people who became members in a longer time period than a year then you will get a fuller picture using trends.
- In the example above there are many more people who became a member in the last year than newcomers in the last year became a member. This suggests that newcomers are taking longer than a year to become a member. This can be explored further in the network movement tab which says the average time to become a member for this church is 1.6 years.
Freshness:
- Freshness metrics record and report on the outcomes of people progressing through stages of engagement and maturity. They focus on the % of people at each stage who were added to church in the past 3 years
- Fresh People - the % of all people who were added to church in the past 3 years
- Fresh Members - the % of members who were added to church
- Fresh Group People - the % of people in groups who were added to church
- Fresh Volunteers - the % of volunteers who were added to church in the past 3 years
- These metrics are relevant once a church is established beyond startup (4+ years). They provide confirmation that the systems for movement are showing outcomes and that new people are progressing and staying. These metrics may also provide early warning of churches that may be stagnating and approaching a tipping point to decline.
- If fresh percentages are between 30-50% this suggests steady influx of people.
- If freshness is low then most of your people, members, groups and serving are made up of people in the system for more than 3 years. That is, there isn't an influx of new people
- If freshness is high then most of your people, members, groups and serving are made up of people recently added (in last year). This could be rapid growth or an under developed core (smaller number of people who aren't new).
In the movement page you will want to look for overall trends of member categories. In this case, steady slow growth is shown with with a new category being added in the last quarter.
The lower bar graph is important to track how people are moving forward into expressing membership. Look for people progressing from added into membership categories then joining a group and serving. Note spikes in quarters as well as comparisons. A few things to note from this example:
- reduction of number of new people in recent quarters
- stagnation from crowd -> core
- growth group additions spike at the beginning of the year (as expected) although this had a reduced intake.
- Also slower uptake in serving this year compared to last.
- A slight uptick in people professing faith.
Details trends
There are several pages of trends that showed detailed analysis. This includes attendance, serving, demographics and more.
Network capabilities
Trends has the capability of aggregating church trend data in networks. This is only possible through a church being invited to share by a network and that church explicitly authorising the sharing with that network.
