Top 5 Donor Metrics for Churches to Pay Attention To

Donor giving isn’t merely a practical need for churches to survive — it’s actually discipleship. Church tithes and offerings can be a remarkably helpful indicator of the overall spiritual health of a church.

And here’s a hint: It’s not about how much money has been given to the church.

Pastor, you can meet your budget and still have a dying church. You can meet your budget and not be discipling anybody.

Church giving is one of the most measurable and concrete datapoints of your ministry — primarily owing to the fact that in the United States, a 501(c)(3) is required to carefully track every donation and provide giving statements to the donors every year. Because of this, even a small church (as long as they’re compliant with the law) has a lot of data on their tithes and offerings.

You may not realize it, but within that giving data is significantly more information than simply “how much money do we have?” In fact, the total number-of-dollars-given is only the tip of the iceberg and frankly, tells you almost nothing about church health on its own.

If you have a church of 200 people and 199 of them give absolutely nothing, but a single business man writes million dollar checks to the church, that is not a healthy church (even though its bills are being…