Hot Off the Presses

This past week we released our first set of Executive Reports (part of the reason there was no post last week – I was scrambling). These reports are, for the most part, quick hit summaries of the major areas of our ministry that are designed to give our Senior Management Team a snapshot of our church health. They basically summarize and trend these areas of our ministry:

• Volunteer team rosters
• Participation in ministry events
• Attendance at serving opportunities

We decided to tackle these first and then add on as we get more comfortable with our data. I said “more comfortable” with our data because, well, the process hasn’t been easy. The structure of our database has been great for individual ministry needs – but isn’t set up for enterprise-wide reporting. I had to correlate 17 different reports to generate the half dozen we issued.

Which is why if you are just setting up your ministry database you’re in a sweet spot – make sure you design in enterprise-wide reporting. You don’t need to use it right away, but believe me, you don’t want to have to restructure somewhere down the road.