If you are gung-ho and ready to go, I want to help you avoid some landmines. Below are two common pitfalls. Avoiding them will save you much frustration.

Unintended side-effects

One of the major problems with setting anything up are the unintended side-effects that sneak up on us. That is just as true when considering how and what you measure. Why? Because people can’t help but play to the numbers. So, make sure your numbers have balances in place, and explain the rationale of each metric to those engaging with it.

For example, if we decide that maturity is best developed through one-on-one discipleship meetings, we may set the goal of getting all our people into meetings like this. We assign this to our ministry staff team, and decide that the way we will measure their performance in this area is by asking, “How many one-on-one discipleship meetings have you had in the last month?” One possible side-effect of this is that the team will drastically lower the quality of their meetings so they can churn out more meetings. And according to your scorecard, they’re doing great.

Measuring the wrong point of the process

Another problem is measuring at the wrong point. It is possible to assess an outcome when you are really wanting to figure out the impact of your actions on factors which influence the outcome. So, make sure you identify which stage of a multi-stage process you are wanting to measure.

For example, let’s say giving is currently down in your local church and your leaders have decided that, if the situation hasn’t changed by a given date, specified actions will have to be taken. They’ve appointed someone to attempt to get things back on track by then. When that person jumps in, they take a shotgun approach to seeing the needle lift on the total income graph – perhaps even throwing in a few unethical approaches for good measure. Now, if they are successful (or unsuccessful), how do you critique what they did and if they created the kind of change you wanted? Because of what we failed to measure – whatever impacts the end result [1] – we have to assume they did everything right (or wrong).

What other pitfalls have you noticed?

Read part 6 (on building your own) here.

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[1] Perhaps the percentage of members who are giving and the percentage of new members who have received teaching about finances. Knowing the answers to those questions will give you far more insightful and actionable information than if you limited your attention to the bottom line.