Exciting New Feature: Religiously Unaffiliated Estimates

FaithX is pleased to announce an exciting new feature that will allow users of Neighborhood Demographic Reports and MapDash for Faith Communities to access best estimates of the number of Religiously Unaffiliated people in the neighborhoods they hope to engage.

The ground-breaking new features, developed with our input by our affiliate, Datastory, are based on algorithms grounded in research by the Pew Research Center and census-based demographic projections from other reputable sources. By using this never-before-available data, faith community leaders will be able confidently predict which of their surrounding neighborhoods will provide the most fertile soil for their missional efforts.

Religiously Unaffiliated Infographic in Neighborhood Demographic Report

The Religiously Unaffiliated Infographic in the Neighborhood Demographic Report (highlighted in green below), provides two estimates of unaffiliated persons in the fast growing young community of Urbana, Maryland):

  • Completely Religiously Unaffiliated: 39% (i..e., Disagree completely with the statement “I attend religious services regularly”)
  • Somewhat Religiously Unaffiliated: 19% (i.e., Disagree somewhat with the statement “I attend religious services regularly”).

In other words, 58% of the people in this congregation’s surrounding neighborhoods are completely or somewhat unaffiliated.

Digging deeper by clicking on either of the demographics, we get the popup below, which converts the above percentages into actual population numbers – in this case, nearly 60,000 people with this congregation’s membership area are either completely or somewhat religiously unaffiliated.

Religiously Unaffiliated Map Layer in MapDash for Faith Communities

With the Religiously Unaffilated map layer in MapDash for Faith Communities, users can then dig even deeper into the numbers of the Religiously Unaffliated neighborhood by neighborhood. This MapDash map layer color codes each Census Block Group by the combined percentage of Complete or Somewhat Disaffiliated individuals.

Digging deeper still by clicking on one of the two Census Block Groups that make up downtown Frederick, Maryland, we discover that it’s 9.7 Religiously Unaffiliated Population rating represent 680 unaffiliated individuals living in the eastern half of the downtown area.

Want to learn more about how your congregation or judicatory can identify and target neighborhoods with the highest percentages and numbers of Religiously Unaffiliated people? Contact us at info@faithx.net.