How to Clean Your Church Database
The simplest solution is to pick a date (I’d suggest one year) and move anyone who has not pinged your church database since that time to “inactive.” You don’t necessarily have to delete them, but you need to remove them from showing as active. If they have yet to engage with you in any way in a year, they are not active!
Once you’ve cleaned your data for that first time, you now have a clear picture of your actual congregation. Now, you need to systematically commit to scrubbing your newly cleaned database, either monthly or quarterly, depending on how often you want to run reports or send segmented communications.
How to Use Your Church Database
Now that you have a clean database, we can do two specific and critical things to help us move people forward on their faith journey.
STEP ONE: Inspiring Discipleship
When you know where people are, you can better inspire them to take their best next step. Just like a company knows what you like and uniquely feeds you recommendations, as a church, we can segment our communication and inspiration into categories of people. I say “categories” intentionally, as most churches don’t have the resources to fund a multi-member data analytics team! If you can track, encourage, and equip people at an individual level, go for it. If that’s daunting, use categories instead.
For example, consider how you can categorically communicate with your congregation about serving.
- Option 1: Send an email to your entire church about serving, using the same language and call to action for everyone. Or,
- Option 2: Segment your congregation using your data to be more targeted in your email campaign language and action step. HINT: This is MUCH better!
For Option 2, you may want to send a targeted email to:
- All parents who are not currently serving.
- People who are in community groups but not serving.
- People who give but do not serve.
- People who previously served.
- Everyone else not serving and not listed in the above segments.
* Segmentation requires you to purge each list as you go. We don’t want people getting multiple emails to serve.
When you segment, you can customize your message. For “parents who are not serving,” you can talk specifically about the impact kid’s ministry has on the community, knowing they have experienced that in their child’s life. For “people who give but don’t serve,” you can speak to (and thank them for) their desire to invest in others through generosity before asking them to consider investing their time. For “people who previously served,” you can thank them for their contributions and announce some new, lower-commitment opportunities.
