Gather Credentials
You’ll need to make sure you have the following before you continue:
- Admin access to ChurchSuite
- The google account login you used when signing up to GHC
- The ability to change and add tags in ChurchSuite
Basic Configuration
It is important that your ChurchSuite account is setup in a way that GHC is able to recognise. Follow each step below to for the best insights into your church health.
Members
This is central to our church health design. GHC needs to be able to differentiate who is a member of your church and who is not yet (i.e. a newcomer). We think it best to simply answer the question: does this person call your church home? This enables GHC to distinguish people who are visitors and track their progress into church.
Use Tags to assign various categories of people. Members are designated by being assigned a Tag that ends in “_” (underscore). For example: Regulars_, Members_, Core_, Committed_
GHC Trends records the number of “Members” each week so you can see the changes in your membership as well as how engaged your members are.
Exclusions
By default, those who aren't members and have been added to your system in the last 12 months are considered newcomers. However you might have people that fit this description that aren't newcomers and ought to be excluded from your metrics. Simply configure the Tags that you assign to excluded people. Any people you want completely ignored by GHC (so you don't dilute you statistics) add a "*" at the end of the Tag and assign it to the relevant people e.g. Record Keeping*
GHC Trends ignores any person assigned a Tag that ends in “*” (asterisk). For example: External Contacts*, Non-attending Parent of Youth*)
People Category/Membership Type
Create Tags in a Tag Category named "People Category" or "Membership Type" and assign them to people. Counts will be recorded against each Tag value.
Place a number at the beginning of the description of each of your people category tags to order them.
Demographics
By default there are 2 Demographics : all contacts are Adults, all children are Children.
For more granularity, create Tags in a Tag Category named "Demographics" and assign them to people. Any tags assigned to people will be used as the demographic. If no Tag is assigned, the default Adult/Child will be used.
Professions
People coming to faith in Jesus is such an important aspect of being a healthy church that we request you with some priority to create a custom field to track this.
Configure a Key Date named "Date Professed".
GHC Trends records the number of people professed each week. Professions are recorded by creating a Key Date named Date Professed and recording the date for the person.
Groups
No special configuration is required.
GHC Trends records the number of Small Groups and the people in them each week, both as a total and as a separate count for each Cluster. Group members assigned the role of leader will be counted as Leaders. The number of people in each role will be counted.
Leaders
Create a Tag named “Leaders” and assign it to people (usually volunteers) who serve in leadership roles.
Setup a Tag named “Next Gen Leaders” for Next Gen ministry leaders.
Group leaders are automatically counted as leaders so this tag is not needed for them.
Leaders of Leaders
Capture people who are Leading and Coaching other Leaders by setting up Smart Tags.
Setup a Tag named “Group Ministry Leaders” for cluster overseers.
Setup a Tag named “Serving Ministry Leaders” for ministry overseers.
Setup a Tag named “Next Gen Ministry Leaders” for Next Gen ministry overseers.
Staff
Create a Tag named “Staff” and assign it to people who work at church.
For part-time staff, use a Tag with the % of time appended. For example, assign a Tag named “Staff50” for someone who works half-time.
Rostered Serving
The ChurchSuite API doesn’t currently report serving data.
Service Attendance
Service attendance is recorded in ChurchSuite which GHC can access.
However, ChurchSuite does not record the time of day of services for which attendance is recorded. To distinguish between services at different times, ensure that the name of each Gathering includes the service time in it (eg 9am Service). Many formats are supported : h, hh:mm, hh:mm a . eg ( Church @9, 10:30 Service, Early Church 7:30 am )
GHC Trends reports attendance breakdown for Metrics whose names start with Adult, Child and Guest as well as the Total attendance at a Gathering. Other Metrics are recorded but not reported in dashboards currently.
Start Date
The date people are added to ChurchSuite is important to some metrics (eg Visitor Ratio, Freshness). ChurchSuite tries to preserve the added date when importing from another ChMS. If this was not preserved, the whole church appears as newcomers with a recent added date. To exclude people in such an import, under Account create a User Group named GHC Start Date. In that group in the From Name field, put a date that’s after the import from which added people are considered to be genuine newcomers in YYYY-MM-DD format (eg 2024-11-22).
Access and improve data
Now that you have configured your ChurchSuite for GHC you can now authorise access for GHC to access this data.
GHC connects as an OAUTH API Integration to your ChurchSuite account. The steps can only be carried out by a User of your ChurchSuite account with Administrator access and only need to be done once.
1. Create a user for authorising.
It is recommended to setup a special (dummy) user to be able to set permissions finely and to minimise the impact of any particular administrator changing roles or leaving in future.
Login to ChurchSuite as an Administrator level User, click on your profile icon in the top right, and then click "Settings [Administrator]".
Select the Users tab, click [+ Add user] to create a new user
Enter these details for new user:
- Username : GHC.Data.Access
- Email: An email address you can access (use your own for now)
- Site: All Sites
- Type: Administrator
- Communication: Unrestricted
- Check: Send Welcome Email
Click [Save]
Log out, check the email address you entered for the new user and open the Welcome to ChurchSuite message.
Click the [Set your password] button, set a password for the new user, and login (you may need to setup MFA)
2. Authorise Connector
Welcome to your first dashboard, the Health Checkup!
Access health checkupIf you’re accessing this dashboard for the first time you will be prompted to:
- Login with your google account
- Authorise the use of google Data Studio
- Authorise access of ChurchSuite
- Click 'Authorize GHC' and then Login to your ChurchSuite when prompted using the GHC.Data.Access user created above.
- Click Allow to approve access to your data.
- When complete you will be instructed to close the windows.
For larger churches, this dashboard can take longer to load. If this is effecting performance you can setup a Turbo dashboard. It improves performance by caching your data (refreshed every 24 hours).
- Turbo setup is a few extra steps. It will guide you through creating a copy of the dashboard into your Google account and will appear under “Saved Dashboards” in your myGHC page.
If you want actionable insights you may first need to do a little work to clean up your data. Don’t worry, this is just standard house-keeping and at GHC we have some tools to make this process much smoother for you. You can check you're set up properly by opening the Setup page in the dashboard.
Analyse data, action insights
Use GHC regularly to:
- Explore your data - we recommend starting at the health gauges - What story do they tell?
- Focus on one area - are there high-level trends? Can you see particular people to prioritise?
- Lead through action - what do you need to do next? Who should you follow up?
- Track the change - use GHC to monitor where you’ve moved the dial
Use pastoral dashboards weekly or monthly and health and strategic dashboards quarterly for best effect.
GHC becomes an even more strategic tool when you’re sharing and discussing insights together:
- Download data as a pdf to share with others.
- Or better yet, create accounts for your team members so that they can access the dashboards as well (requires subscription)