Ministry Answers
MinistryPlatform is great at showing you the current state of your church. For questions like "how many members do we have right now", you can get a quick answer. But what if you need to know the number of members you had last year at this time and the year before that in order to see membership growth patterns? That's where Ministry Answers can help!
Ministry Answers is a tool that takes a snapshot of your data on a weekly basis. A stored procedure runs every night to capture the current information that you've defined as important. For example, Ministry Answers calculates the number of members you have this week and saves it. Then, six months later, you can ask how many members you had six months ago, and you'll get your answer right away.
With this information, you can graph a membership trend in your favorite analytics tool (like Power BI or Excel). This visualization can help you gain an understanding of what's happening in your ministry over time. Data can be pulled into summaries based on congregation, week, and fiscal periods. It can also be grouped by congregation, program, and ministry.
Now a question for you: Ready to get started? If so, keep reading!
Define Your Questions
Decide what you need to know to do ministry; that is, the information that will drive your ministry decisions. You may already have some questions in mind – maybe some that have come from leadership or denominational/diocesan reporting requirements.
- How many people donated to a particular program last month?
- How many offerings by campus were collected for the last three years?
- How many people filled out a connection card each week?
- How many people reached a particular milestone this quarter?
- How many check-ins were there for a particular event week-to-week?
- What were our membership patterns over the last five years?
Once you define your questions, you can start tracking the data necessary to get the answers you need.
Track the Data
After Professional Services installs Ministry Answers on your system, you will see a folder in the Advanced Menu called Ministry Answers. From there, go to the Ministry Questions page to create the questions you defined.
Each record on this page is a question. It contains a description of what the question does, the SQL required to generate the answer, and whether the answers show up on certain summary views. These records make up a list of questions. Every night, MinistryPlatform asks these questions and stores the answers. This data is tracked over time.
You can create new questions and start tracking additional data at any time. To learn about creating questions, see Understanding the T-SQL.
Get Your Answers
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On each of these pages, you can select a View to look at data for specific periods of time, such as this month, last month, this year, or last year. For example, here's what the Last Ministry Week view might look like:
Next Steps
That's a detailed overview of Ministry Answers. For a deep dive, see Understanding the T-SQL, and then you can do cool things like write your own questions and update your data outside the nightly procedure!