The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Finding Fertile Soil – Missional Opportunity Index

Part 3 in our MapDash Analytics Series

How do you know if your judicatory needs a new congregation? And how do you know where?

How can you know whether there are opportunities for multiple congregations to collaborate in engaging growing communities that they share?

How do you know whether investing resources in a struggling congregation is likely to make a difference?

These are important questions that every judicatory has to answer sooner or later.

The Missional Opportunity Index (or MOI) was designed to give judicatories data that can help them answer these important questions and more.

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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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Forecasting Emerging Missional Opportunities – Creating the Missional Opportunity Index (Part 2)

As you learned in last week’s post, the Missional Opportunity Index (MOI) is a version of what marketing professionals call a Market Texture: a map-based representation of emerging market conditions based on a predictive algorithm composed of relevant correlated demographic factors. To generate the MOI, the program starts by creating a quarter-mile-square matrix across the entirety of a diocese, district, or other judicatory. Then it “drops a pin” on one of those thousands of points, samples the population with a 15-min drive from that point, and extracting 5-year projections of four demographic factors that drive Missional Opportunity (MO).

These four opportunity-related factors are:

  • Population Growth.Increasing population in an area is directly related to MO, as it represents an influx of new and unaffiliated people and/or a rapidly increasing rising generation.
  • Diversity Growth. Increasing diversity in an area is directly related to MO, becauseeven if area population has plateaued, it represents turnover in the current population. 
  • Generational Balance.Increasing imbalance between older and younger cohorts is inversely related to MO, as rapidly increasing or decreasing median age predicts reduced financial resources.
  • Qualified Population (a measure of population vs. competition).The number of same denomination worship centers competing for the population with a 15-min DriveTime is inversely correlated to MO.

The MOI map below represents Missional Opportunity in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. The map represents areas of high MO in medium-to-dark green, areas of moderate MO in yellow-to-light-green, and areas of low MO in orange-to-dark red. It forecasts that several areas of high Missional Opportunity will be emerging in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland over the next five years, each of which will require different missional strategies to effectively engage.

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Forecasting Emerging Missional Opportunities – Creating the Missional Opportunity Index (Part 1)

A good hockey player plays where the puck is.
A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

Wayne Gretzky
(Canadian professional ice hockey player – 1979 to 1999)

Missional opportunity is like hockey in this respect: If you wait to engage it after it has already emerged, it is already too late to engage it effectively. If you do want to engage missional opportunity effectively, you have to be there, prepared and ready, where and when it emerges, because if you wait, you will be forced to play a losing game of reactive catch-up after the fact.

Say you are considering starting a new congregation. If you wait until a growing community has developed a sufficient number of people to populate and financially support a house of worship, the rising price of real estate will have made purchasing the property on which to construct it cost prohibitive (if there are any suitable properties that have not already been snapped up by builders or more forward-thinking denominations). Similarly, if your established congregation waits to adapt its ministries to its changing neighborhood until the transformation is complete, one-time newcomers may have set down roots in congregations that loved them enough to adapt to them. No, you have to be willing to take the risk of predicting where and when the opportunity is going to be doing what is necessary to be there.

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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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