When churches and nonprofits hear the word “accountability” they often think solely of something that happens in the finance and accounting realm. However, if you use a broader term, such as “metrics” or “results” their eyes and their perspective will widen.While I find that there is a general and pretty wide-spread aversion to metrics and accountability in the church, like other time-tested and proven business tools, the wise ministry leaders will embraced it. I'm not sure exactly why so many ministries are adverse to using metrics and would hate to think that they just don't want to be accountable to anyone for anything.
When I was in the business world, I often was responsible for achieving results in a number of different areas, not only financial but also for a number of non-financial processes with much more fuzzy objectives like “customer and employee satisfaction”.
In the business-world, It is not untypical for managers to be held accountable for the total amount of hours worked by all employees or the amount of overtime hours paid in a particular quarter. In larger businesses, it is routine to compare metrics and results between offices and hold the local manager accountable to achieve similar results with the same funding, same number of employees or the same amount of resources. In addition, the reason for creating non-financial metrics and measuring their results is because business leaders knew that what was measured was recognized as something that “mattered”.
Our leaders of our Churches and ministries need to embrace this concept of accountability and begin to track metrics to help determine which of their services, activities and ministries are working well and which are not.
The key in determining metrics includes identifying the “hard” and the “soft” numbers that can be identified and track them in the same manner over time. Some hard numbers include contributions, giving, attendance (kids, youth, adult), baptisms, hands-raised, number of employees, number of members, number of volunteers, etc. Soft numbers may include comments received or survey results, number of prayer requests or communications, and processes like hospital visits, telephone calls, referrals and guests. For churches, there is a new and free tool that will help them track some of these hard numbers at www.churchmetrics.com/
Without accountability and metrics it’s impossible for ministries to determine how they are doing, when to hire employees, whether employees are producing results and whether to start new ministries. If ministries really want to be good stewards of resources, there is no other way than holding themselves accountable.
