The CVA Judicatory Dashboard: Tracking the Vitality and Sustainability of Your Congregations

Click here to watch a video about how the Judicatory Dashboard works

How can we directly monitor the vitality and sustainability of our congregations?

How can we determine the kinds of assistance our congregations need?

How can we evaluate the effectiveness of the assistance we provide our congregations?

How can we supplement our backward-looking parochial reporting data with forward-looking diagnosting data that actually helps our congregations make positive changes to improve their missional effectiveness?

These are some of the questions and concerns judicatory leaders were bringing to us that led to the development of a Judicatory Dashboard to complement our Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA) tool.

The Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA) is a research-based online diagnostic tool designed to measure a congregation’s vitality (how healthy it is) and congregational sustainability (is it adequately resourced). It contains 70 criterion-referenced questions which measure 10 areas of congregational vitality and 2 areas of congregational sustainability. It is and will always be FREE for congregations to use.

The CVA Judicatory Dashboard is a subscription-based, customized dashboard which allows a diocese to administer the CVA directly to its congregations. Using this platform judicatories can collect anonymized summaries of vitality and sustainability assessments from every congregation along with responses to up to 10 additional judicatory-specific questions developed by the judicatory. 

This enables judicatory leadership to monitor the vitality and sustainability of congregations regularly over time and assess the impact of judicatory interventions. It allows them to supplement their parochial reporting data with forward-looking diagnosting data that helps their congregations understand their strengths and weaknesses, and actually provides them with useful data that will help them become more vital and sustainable.

The Judicatory Dashboard was developed in response to the requests of several judicatories, who saw the value of the CVA and wanted to integrate into their practices and harness its potential for positive change.

Two judicatories already have subscribed to the Dashboard. The Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma was our first Judicatory Dashboard user. The second is the Episcopal Diocese of New York. And we are in discussions with additional Episcopal and Roman Catholic dioceses, Lutheran synods, and other judicatories. 

The CVA Judicatory Dashboard is subscription-based. The cost of a subscription is $2,495 per year (with an initial setup charge). The subscription cost covers: continued research on congregational vitality and sustainability, continued refinement of the tool, including translating the questions and prescriptive recommendations into different languages and tailoring them to the ecclesiology terminology of different denominations, and annual updates and upgrades based on the above. It also includes a discount on FaithX services to judicatory subscribers.

The initial setup charge is typically $2,500 (with a $1,000 early adopter discount through September 1, 2021). The setup fee covers programming required to customize the dashboard to the specific judicatory and its needs (setting up an account for the judicatory and sub-accounts for its congregations, and adding judicatory-specific questions). It also covers assistance in designing effective judicatory-specific questions, orienting and training judicatory staff, and helping judicatory staff think through how to integrate the CVA and Judicatory Dashboard into their current congregational assistance mechanisms and parochial reporting.

Why the $1,000 early adopter discount? In exchange for the discount, we ask early-adopting judicatories to provide us with feedback on the Dashboard and the onboarding process, which will be helpful to us in making final tweaks to the Dashboard before the hard-launch in September.

If you want to watch a video about how the Judicatory Dashboard works, click here.

And if you are interested in exploring how you might implement the CVA and Dashboard in your judicatory, we’d love to talk with you. Please contact us at info@CVAtool.org or info@FaithX.net.


The Congregational Vitality Assessment and the CVA Judicatory Dashboard are the result of a collaboration between The FaithX Project and the Episcopal Church Foundation, and are available to faith communities of all denominations and faith traditions.