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Ministry Answers

Explore how Ministry Answers can empower your church with data-driven insights by tracking membership growth, donations, and other key metrics over time.

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 to see membership growth patterns? That's where Ministry Answers can help!

Note: You must use Professional Services to get Ministry Answers installed on your system. They will coach you on how it works and create sample questions with you. If you get stuck, you can always reach out to Professional Services for help. Hourly rates apply.

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 deem 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 understand what's happening in your ministry over time. You can pull data into summaries based on congregation, week, and fiscal periods. You can also group data by congregation, program, and ministry.

Ready to get started?

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 and diocesan reporting requirements.

Your questions should include a data point you currently track in MinistryPlatform and a time frame. For example:
  • 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 completed 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 you need 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 display 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.

The Ministry Questions page showing a list of all tracked questions

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

A few weeks after you start tracking the data for the questions you created, you can get answers! There are several pages available in MinistryPlatform:
  • Ministry Week Answers – Displays the answers for all questions over all weeks. This is the raw weekly data.
  • Fiscal Period Answers – Displays the answers for all questions over a month-long period. Note that this is not per calendar month, such as January, but where your ministry week start date fell within the month.
  • Fiscal Year Summary – Displays annual data.
  • Congregation By Fiscal Period & Congregation By Week – Displays data filtered by Congregation for the period or week.
  • Ministry By Fiscal Period, Ministry By Fiscal Year, & Ministry By Week – Displays data filtered by ministry, if you track it, for the period, year, or week.
Ministry Answers menu with options for Ministry Questions, Ministry Week Answers, Fiscal Period Answers, Fiscal Year Summary, Congregation by Fiscal Year, Congregation By Fiscal Period, Congregation By Week, Ministry by Fiscal Year, Ministry By Fiscal Period, and Ministry By Week

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 Calendar Year view might look like:

The Ministry Week Answers page showing the different view options, including Last Calendar Year

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!