Earlier this week, I wrote about 5 reasons every youth ministry needs goals. Today I want to dive practically into how we set, measure, and track the goals in our student ministry.

     Having written goals for your youth ministry is a huge step! It puts you on the winning track. However, learning how to set, measure, and track your goals can take your leadership and youth ministry to a whole new level!

     Below I will share how we do this with our three main goals: attendance, volunteers, and student attendance on the weekend. The odds are you do this a little differently in your ministry context. However, I believe our process can serve as a guide & starting point as you evaluate your ministry goals!

HOW WE SET OUR GOALS:

1) ATTENDANCE 

When setting our attendance goal for 2017, we started by asking two questions. 1) What was last year’s average attendance?  2) What is our normal annual growth percentage? 

The first question an important question, but one I find many youth ministries don’t have an answer to. It’s important not to guess here (because we tend to guess high.) The answer to this question needs to be based on hard data over a year’s time.

If you don’t track your weekly attendance numbers, this is the place to start! Start this year by counting attendance each week and recording the numbers. At the end of the year, you’ll have black and white numbers that lead you to a true average attendance. If you already track attendance, average of your attendance from the past year. 

The second question is about identifying normal growth trends for your youth ministry. In our youth ministry, we will grow by 5-6% most years just by doing what we’re already doing. Therefore, we want to set an attendance goal that stretches us and is higher than that growth trend.

Our attendance goal needs to push us to get better and reach further. Since 5-6% is that general trend, we set our goal at 10% growth. This is pushing us to work harder, get creative, and think more deeply!

2) VOLUNTEERS

Everything in our youth ministry is centered around small groups, so we also set our volunteer goal with small groups in mind! To find how many volunteer leaders we need, we multiply the number of small groups we have by 2.5. Then we add the number of support roles needed.

We know we need two small group leaders in each group to be fully staffed. We also know we will need three leaders in large groups that need to multiply. This is where the 2.5 number comes from.

For instance, right now we have 54 small groups, which means we need roughly 135 leaders to staff them. We also need 30 more volunteers in support roles like security and traffic vols. Altogether, this means we need a total of 165 volunteers currently. 

We used the same formula to set our volunteer goal for this year. We based it on how many small groups we think we will need to cover the attendance goal.

3) WEEKEND ATTENDANCE

Our weekend attendance goal counts the percentage of students who attend on Wednesdays and are connected to the weekend. This is our most important goal! It help us measure our students connection to the larger church.

If students are only connected to youth ministry, they will graduate from the church when they graduate from youth ministry. When they’re connected to the church as a whole, they’re much more likely to stay involved after graduation!

This is also our only static goal. We came up with a target number, and it stays the same each year. We don’t want to grow this number, but instead want to maintain it.

Our goal is to have 75% of the students who attend youth ministry on Wednesday’s attend church on the Weekend.  However, this is also a delicate balance. We don’t want to go much higher than 75%, because it would mean we are reaching less unchurched students. We also don’t want it to dip too low, as that would mean students are connected to youth ministry more than the church!

Our whole goal here is to maintain balance around 75%. This would mean we are consistently reaching new students from outside the church and also connecting them to the larger church body. 

HOW WE MEASURE OUR GOALS:

1) ATTENDANCE 

We measure our weekly attendance 100% based on check ins. In our context, youth ministry is the only thing happening on Wednesday nights. So for security purposes, we have everyone who enters the building check in.

Once they check in, they receive a name tag that lets us know who they are, their grade, what small group they’re in. It also lets us know whether they are a first time guest or an existing student.

This allows us to accurately track the number of students and volunteers in attendance! It’s proved much more accurate than doing head counts each week. At the end of the year, we have an average attendance of all 48 nights we met.

One final note on attendance. We measure from year to year, and not week to week. If you’ve been in youth ministry long, you know how crazy week to week attendance can fluctuate and make you feel! We’ve found comparing our attendance to the same night of the previous year to be much more accurate. Plus, it keeps us from wringing our hands and worrying so much!

2) VOLUNTEERS

To measure our volunteer numbers, we take the number of individual volunteers who checked in over the past month. We only count volunteers who are fully trained an placed though. We don’t count volunteers still in training or in our apprenticeship process. 

It’s important to note that we count actual attendance and not our volunteer roster. Our roster can have the correct number of volunteers on it, but we know they all won’t show up every night.  Counting volunteer attendance allows us to recruit in a way that compensates for when leaders miss.

3) WEEKEND ATTENDANCE

The best way we’ve found to measure weekend attendance is through a monthly survey. Once per month, each small group leader asks their students the following two questions.

1. Did you attend Faith Promise in the past 2-3 weekends?
2. Did you attend another church in the past 2-3 weekends

The average church attender in the U.S. attends  2-3 times a month. We ask the first question this way because we want to find out who is connected to the church. We consider a student connected who attends at least two times a month. 

We also ask who attended another church in the same timeframe. This lets us measure a couple of things. Number one, it helps us to see how many students are a part of split families. Knowing this allows us to minister to them better!

Second, it helps us get a better idea of where the disconnected percentage is. If the majority of the other 25% attended another church, it means our growth is from students from other churches. If the other 25% didn’t attend anywhere, it tells us we are growing by reaching unchurched students. 

HOW WE TRACK OUR GOALS:

In our youth ministry, we track our goals in two primary ways: Scorecards and a Scoreboard.

SCORECARDS:

Every staff member has an individual scorecard with their goals & YTD measurements on it. At the end of each month, everyone knows where they stand. We know whether we’re ahead, behind, or on track to reach our goals. We have found this to be extremely helpful in providing clarity to what each person needs to do and focus on. Here’s an example of one of my scorecards.

A SCOREBOARD:

While scorecards provide clarity and accountability on an individual level, we wanted to find a way to unify our whole team behind the goals!  If we all know where we stand and try to move the needle together in one area, we are much more likely to make progress! 

To do this, we made a scoreboard in our office. As soon as you walk into our student ministry office, the first thing you’ll see is a scoreboard tracking our ministry goals. Staff, volunteers, and students all see the same thing, and it’s providing more unity on our team than ever before!

 We are fighting for progress together, and we are all praying over the same things! Here is a picture of our scoreboard as it sits for the beginning of 2017.

     I hope what we do to set, measure, and track our goals has been helpful to you and your youth ministry! We want to hear from you though! How will you set, measure, and track your goals this year?