How many online views equal one real person in Church? What formula should we use to equate Facebook, YouTube and Zoom hits? In this blog I want to take some time to consider the metrics available for online services and to explain the choice that we have made in the ACC.
What makes a good metric?
As I say in my booklet “How grows the vineyard” (see blog with the same name) there are many reasons for choosing a metric. Here I would like to consider four of the reasons for the metric we chose.
i) Easy to collect: Making a metric easy to collect means considering all the stages of the collection process. The ACC is one of the few denominations which does not have central collection of data directly from parishes. Our data comes through the dioceses. The dioceses have to collect some of that data from parishes. If the data is hard to find, then we are less likely to get it accurately and in time. So we make the data we chose to collect as simple as possible, for example, only collecting the total number of baptisms, not the separate numbers of adult and child baptisms
ii) It should give useful information on the subject: This may seem obvious but we have been gently letting go of some metrics which, whilst interesting and historic, were not actually useful to the main mission of the Church. For example, we no longer collect numbers for church schools or organisations and groups.
iii) It should be accurate, consistent and “valid”: Given the wide range of types of church and of people across the country we need to make sure that as much as possible the same thing is being measured irrespective of whether they come from Victoria, or Toronto, or the Arctic. This is not as straight forward as it may sound, for example the various definitions of church membership across the ACC are always intriguing.
iv) What is the effect of the metric? I believe that “what we measure, we treasure”, so what the church collects as data, we will consider more significant. The nature of that significance may vary substantially. It is said that certain metrics tend to increase when a parish is in the hiring process and wants to appear attractive to potential incumbents….
Online Metrics for 3 platforms
Since the start of the pandemic, Churches have tended to focus on three different platforms to deliver online services, these being Facebook, YouTube, and Zoom. The first thing we need to recognise is that these three provide very different experiences and the numbers involved thus mean different things. There is no consistency between the different platforms and may not be consistency within a single platform. For example, let’s consider the differences between the Kootenay diocesan compline service on Facebook, the YouTube service from All Saints Vernon, and the zoom service from St John’s Fruitvale.
The diocesan service is livestreamed but is also available as a recorded service. A single metric is available for the number of “views”. It is not easy to tell how many were live viewers and how many recorded viewers. It is not easy to know how much of the service people watch for, or whether they skipped through parts of the service.
The service on YouTube is also available both live and recorded. As it is on a Google service, there are much better analytical statistics which will reveal how many were watching at any one time. By digging into those statistics one might get a good idea of how many individual views were happening. But also, because it is a YouTube channel, there might be a substantial percentage of automated connections (or “bots”).
The service on Zoom is much more straightforward to consider. Every viewer can be seen, assuming that somebody is counting during the service. It is also therefore possible to know how many people were watching at each screen.
So the number collected by these three platforms mean different things, and they mean different thing depending on how the platform is used. A service which is provided as recorded only on YouTube, is different to a service which is livestreamed and available as recorded.
Online views vs bums on pews
How do these metrics provide useful information? It appears that for many clergy the primary consideration in collecting data on online services is to find out how many “real people” the online service was connecting with. In other word – how many “bums on pews” does the online metric equate to. As well as the issues of the connection time there is a further complication in that some suggest there is a mathematical formula to give the bum-on-pew equivalency for a YouTube or Facebook view.
I want to state very clearly that I believe there can be no equivalency between online and in-person numbers. This is for the reasons above, and also because online and in-person are very different kinds of engagement. Neither of them is lesser than the other. They are different. They are both important for the ACC going forward. Online services provide something that in-person cannot provide, to a community that may not be able to access in-person services.
What we do and do not collect.
For these reasons the ACC does not collect numbers for online service attendance. It would be too complicated to do so. The numbers would be too inconsistent to have any statistical validity, and a premise of equivalency with in-person attendance would be a false equivalency.
What we do collect is the number of online services available in a diocese. This number is relatively easy to collect at a diocesan level. It requires a diocese to find out whether parishes are providing an online service of some kind, valuable information for a diocese to know. It values the provision of those services rather than enumerating the take up of these service.
The provision of online services is the greatest expansion of service provision in the ACC in the last hundred years. Whilst this provision was brought about in response to the Covid crisis, we hope that online services will continue to reach out to local communities and beyond.
