Gather Credentials
You’ll need to make sure you have the following before you continue:
- Admin access to Elvanto
- Your Elvanto API Key
- The google account login you used when signing up to GHC
- The ability to change category names in Elvanto
Basic Configuration
It is important that your Elvanto 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). Membership for GHC simply means people who call your church home. This enables GHC to distinguish people who are visitors and track their progress into church. GHC identifies church members by People Categories:
Configure the People Categories that you assign members to.
Members are distinguished by the People Category they are in. People will be counted as Members if the People Category they are in meets one of the following criteria:
- The name of the People Category ends in “_” (underscore)
- The name of the People Category begins with Member or Regular
- The colour of the People Category ends in “1” (ie its colour code ends in the number 1)
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. Any people category you want completely ignored by GHC (so you don't dilute you statistics) add a "" at the end e.g. Record Keeping
Groups
Configure the Group Category that you assign Small Groups to. If you've already setup GHC for your church this will already be done.
GHC Trends records the number of Small Groups and the people in them each week. Small Groups are distinguished by being in a Group Category with its name ending in “” (underscore) (eg a Group Category named Small Groups)
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.
Create a custom field called "Date Professed" as a Date field and record the date in a person’s profile. Follow the steps here if you need help doing this.
Access and improve data
Welcome to your first dashboard, the Health Checkup! If you’re accessing this dashboard for the first time you may be prompted to:
- Login with your google account
- Authorize the use of google Data Studio
- Enter your Elvanto API key (see step 1)
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)