The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Neighborhood Missional Intelligence – Report or Assessment?

The 2nd of 8 posts on MapDash Analytics

by Ken Howard

FaithX Strategic Missional Services now offers two resources to explore missional opportunities at the local community level. The first is a Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report. The second is a Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Assessment.

Think of the difference between the Report and the Assessment as the difference between taking a “selfie” and sitting for a portrait, except the subject is not you but your community and both are much more detailed than you might expect.

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An Introduction to MapDash Analytics

To fully understand location-based data we need to organize and examine the data in four different ways. We have to:

  1. Visualize – Get your faith community’s data on an map, so you can explore it visually.
  2. Contextualize – Find your faith community’s place in the data, so you can examine its missional context.
  3. Analyze – Interrogate the data, to reveal what it means for your faith community.
  4. Socialize – Share your data, with leaders, members, the community, funders, and other stakeholders

Today’s post is about step 3, and the analytic tools MapDash for Faith Communities provides that help you reveal what demographic, lifestyle, and other data mean for your faith community or judicatory.

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Using Science to Find the Faithful: FaithX and MapDash Feature in WhereNext eMagazine

FaithX and MapDash for Faith Communities were featured in an article published this week in WHERENEXT, an online eMagazine of Esri, the international GIS company that provides much of the data that powers MapDash. The author’s team interviewed FaithX founder Ken Howard, and faith leaders representing several FaithX clients, including:

Scroll down for an excerpt from and a link to the WhereNext article…

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Why does MapDash for Faith Communities Cost More?

 

“Why Is MapDash for Faith CommunitiesTM cost more than other demographic programs?”

It’s a question we get asked a lot. And it is true that an annual diocesan subscription to MapDash is more expensive than other programs, though renewal costs in subsequent years are somewhat less than the first year. And this is before adding the cost of guided strategic missional assessment and planning that we recommend for the first year.  Which brings us to a second question we get asked a lot…

“Why would I want to pay more for MapDash and even more for several days of consultation over a 3-6 month period? Why can’t we just use the cheaper program and do the missional assessment and planning work ourselves?”

I know, that’s actually two more questions. And all three are reasonable questions to ask.

And yes, of course you could do all those things. You could pay a lot less by subscribing to a less expensive program and doing all the demographic assessment and planning without any help.

But there are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t do those things… and why you should invest more in MapDash subscription and in guided strategic missional planning.

There’s a reason that MapDash for Faith Communities is costs more.

It has to.

It has cost more because it is loaded with judicatory and congregational analytics that aren’t available anywhere else.

Analytics are what the name implies: practical faith community metrics derived from an analysis of key internal and/or external factors. And MapDash for Faith Communities contains eight faith community analytics unavailable elsewhere:

  • Congregational Vitality Index (CVI)
  • Congregational Sustainability Index (CSI)
  • Sustainability–Viability Margin Index (SVMI)
  • Missional Opportunity Index (MOI)
  • Missional Context Report (MCR)
  • MissionWebs
  • DriveTime Analysis (15 min)
  • Study Area Stats

Of course, we could provide MapDash for Faith Communities at a lower cost if we left out these eight judicatory-specific analytics. But that would make it less valuable.

Which brings us to a second reason that you should invest more in MapDash…

Because it IS more valuable.

The analytics it provides makes MapDash exponentially more valuable.

Where else could you go to get an annually updated assessment of vitality for every congregation in your judicatory with a single mouse-click? Or a five-year projection each congregation’s sustainability?

Where else could you go to see every area of projected emerging missional opportunity in your judicatory at a glance? Or every area of emerging missional challenge?

Where else could you go to see the area of greatest influence and attraction of every congregation in your judicatory? Or the areas of greatest competition among congregations?

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FaithX Site Suffers Malware Attack… and a few of you can help

 

Late last week FaithX.net suffered a malware attack. The malware in question had an innocuous name – I mean “Hello Dolly” sounds harmless, right? Indeed, we didn’t realize it was an attack when we first discovered the program on our Plugins page. But it did one heck of a lot of damage – before we identified and removed it, about a third of our files we gone and the menu structure was scrambled.

Some of the files were old and unused. Some were simple and easily recreated. But one page in particular was a real loss…

 

Our “Testimonials Page”

Every link to our Testimonials page instead took us to the dreaded “404 Page Not Found” page. Better than the “white blog screen of death,” I suppose. But still quite a blow.

We’ve been able to find many of the lost testimonials in the sender’s original emails (so glad I’m so bad at deleting old emails). And we’ve restored many others from memory. But others are seemingly nowhere to be found.

 

So here’s how a select few of you can help…

If you are one of those people who provided us with a testimonial for MapDash for Faith Communities, our Missional Journey consulting program, or one of our consultants – Mary Frances, Steve Matthews, or me – and could send it to us again or recreate it, we would be forever grateful.

If you are not one of those people, but have been using MapDash or worked with one of us, or even had a demo and were impressed, and are willing to write a sentence or two about it, that also would make us very happy.

If you fall into either of those groups, and you want to help, just jot a few thoughtful words in an email and address it to ken@faithx.net, and you can be one of…

The Few, the Proud, the Testimonializers

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