by The Rev. Ken Howard
at-risk populations
This blog post is part of a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.
Click here for the previous post
From what I am hearing from most of my sisters and brothers of the cloth, it would not be overstating the case to say that the Coronavirus pandemic has turned their lives as faith leaders upside down, along with just about every idea they have about how faith communities are “supposed” to operate. It has begun to seem like every task has become incredibly urgent and they are running as fast as they can just to keep up with the havoc the COVID crisis is wreaking with their congregations and the (sometimes) at-risk populations they serve.
So how do we move past this “tyranny of the urgent” and get out ahead of COVID-19 with a little short-term organization and a little longer-term planning?
One way to do this is through data mapping and analytics. Data-mapping is a way to visualize all the data bombarding us – and our congregations and neighborhoods – in context. Analytics are a specialized form of data-mapping that help us analyze, evaluate, and make decisions based on the data before us.
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