Unlock the power of data in your church communications with this episode of "MyCom Church Communications and Marketing" with Lauren Miers.
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In this episode
Lauren Miers, Senior Communication Specialist of the Missouri Conference of The United Methodist Church, joins host Ryan Dunn to explore practical, actionable ways data can transform your ministry’s messaging and outreach. Whether you serve in a local church or a conference office, you’ll learn how to use both qualitative and quantitative data to make smarter decisions, reach the right audiences, and give your congregation what they truly need.
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Episode transcript
Ryan Dunn [00:00:00]:
Hey churches, are you looking for ways to financially support your college students? Learn how the United Methodist Higher Education foundation can help through its matching fund um dollars for scholars program@umhef.org today. Hiya. This is the MICOM Church Communications and Marketing podcast. We're building your digital ministry toolkit and helping to bring your congregation into the digital age. My name is Ryan Dunn. I'm a fellow traveler on the journey to better church communications and connections. We're going to talk with Lauren Miers, who's a senior Communication Specialist for the Missouri Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. And with Lauren, we explore the concept of data driven communication, particularly in the context of church communications.
Ryan Dunn [00:00:57]:
Lauren shares her journey and insights on how to effectively use both qualitative and quantitative data to inform communication strategies. We go into the importance of understanding your audience, choosing the right platforms for content, and establishing a systematic workflow for data collection and analysis. It's it is very exciting stuff. I know that maybe we don't get super excited about data, but there is a lot to pull from here. If conversations like this are valuable for you, then make sure to hit the subscribe or Follow button on your podcast listening platform. It would also be a big help to us if you left a rating or review or if you made a comment about what you appreciate about this particular episode. Apps like Spotify and YouTube allow for comments and it lets us know what kind of content is meaningful for your communications ministry. As part of our conversation, Lauren Miers provided a bit of her own bio.
Ryan Dunn [00:02:01]:
So let's roll right into our talk on data driven communications here on the Mycom podcast. Lauren, we were recently at a conference together, so to speak. We were both leading breakout sessions. Unfortunately, that meant that we didn't get to check out what the other was presenting on and I was really interested in learning about what you were presenting on and data driven communication. So really am thankful that you've kind of decided to take the opportunity to rehash what it is that you shared at the conference. But before we get into the data driven communication, since this is one of our first times meeting, I'd love to know a little bit about your background. Like what got you into the work that you're doing now as a senior communications specialist with the Missouri Conference.
Lauren Miers [00:02:54]:
Yeah, yeah, glad to be here. So I like to say this is the only job I've ever had, right. So I'm a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, you know, the best school of journalism. And I grew up United Methodist, stepped away from United Methodist Church in my college years. And then right after graduation, saw this, this posting when I was up in Columbia, Missouri and took the job and started almost 10 years ago. So, yeah, the only job I have, I've ever had. And then now the fun fact about me is that I'm actually a member of the Oklahoma Annual Conference. So I live in Tulsa and attend university, UMC here in Tulsa.
Lauren Miers [00:03:36]:
And so I get a whole variety of perspectives on the United Methodist Church, and I really love it.
Ryan Dunn [00:03:43]:
Excellent. Good. Even after 10 years, you're still loving it, huh?
Lauren Miers [00:03:46]:
That's right.
Ryan Dunn [00:03:47]:
Wonderful. Well, let's start with the big umbrella question. What do you mean by data driven communications?
Lauren Miers [00:03:54]:
Yeah, so data driven communications to me is meaning we're using data. Right. And we'll define that here in a second. But we're using data to inform our communication strategy. And at my UMAC workshop, I really tried to break it down for folks into, you know, what is one question that you could, that you want to answer? Right. Could be communications related, could also be like programming content related, you know, and then we kind of walked through how we might use data to inform or answer that question. And so when I'm talking about data, I'm talking about, of course, quantitative data, like numbers, the things we would put in a pie chart. Right.
Lauren Miers [00:04:40]:
But I'm also talking about qualitative data. Right. So the stories, the anecdotes we're hearing, the open end question, feedback people are receiving, but also. Right. In church world, it's. It's the feelings. Right, Right. Like how do we, how do we feel about that and recognizing that that's not the whole story, but it is part of the story.
Lauren Miers [00:05:00]:
And how can we put some numbers to those feelings and get a fuller picture of how things are going? Because I find that a lot of us in our jobs that have increased duties and, you know, there's not more hours in the day, which is really quite a ripoff that, you know, we're trying to figure out how to cram more things in and. Lost my train of thought. Trying to figure out how to cram more things in.
Ryan Dunn [00:05:30]:
Yeah, we've got so many hours in the day, we're probably being asked to look at more or to be more productive with what we have. And.
Lauren Miers [00:05:39]:
Yes. And so, you know, we're trying to cram more things in and so we're just kind of operating off of. Right. Like our spidey senses. Right, right. Like what I generally, I feel like this is going well or that's going well or the vibes are Good. And we're not really taking a chance to step back and saying like, is this working? Is this landing how we want it to land? Are we reaching the people we want to be reaching? So data kind of introduces a new informational element into that that helps us kind of back some things with facts.
Ryan Dunn [00:06:11]:
Okay. You know, you talked about getting a feeling for whether I guess what we're presenting as communicators is making an impact with people. I like to talk about, like, is what we're offering providing value for people? Do you have some favorite pieces of data that kind of hinted how people feel about what you're presenting? Because certainly we can get, we can get some killer numbers on things from driving people towards outrage. So. But that's not what we're after. So what do you look at that maybe gives a sense that like, oh, this is valuable for people or people are being inspired by this.
Lauren Miers [00:06:54]:
Yeah, yeah. So I. This is such a marketing word. But right, it's the conversion, right. Not the faith conversion. Right, the marketing conversion.
Ryan Dunn [00:07:03]:
Yeah. You know, when we're hopefully down the funnel leads towards a faith conversion. But we.
Lauren Miers [00:07:09]:
That's right. Yeah. Me like the bottom of the funnel, you know, the long game there. But no. So like if we take Facebook, for example, right. So like on Facebook, like reach is nice, impressions are nice, Likes and comments are nice. But I'm really like, I care about the share. Right.
Lauren Miers [00:07:28]:
It was enough that you wanted to share it and extend it to your whole network. Right. Or, or the post link. Click. Right. So like most of our posts have a link in it. You know, did you click that link to learn more and then. Right.
Lauren Miers [00:07:45]:
That further step, did you then register for our thing? Did you spend time with our story on our website? You know, we've been trying to do more just social media stories. Right. Trying to change up how we do our storytelling and kind of lower the bar. You know, it doesn't have to be a 500 word written story. It can just be two paragraphs and some great photos. And so, you know, for something like that, the metric of like is it landing is going to be a little different. And we've seen, we've seen that change. Right.
Lauren Miers [00:08:16]:
There's no link to click, but people are commenting, they're sharing. You know, it's a different type of feedback loop there.
Ryan Dunn [00:08:23]:
Yeah, that's interesting because I think for a lot of us, we kind of came up with this mindset of, well, we have this story to tell, so we're going to put that story on our website and Then we're going to go to social media to invite people to go to our website. And you're suggesting that maybe that's not the best practice.
Lauren Miers [00:08:41]:
So in a lot of cases it is. It's the both and. Right. And so you got to think about like, what are all your different channels, right. And so not everything is a great fit for every channel. Right. So a good example is if the bishop has written a column and it's just a written column, and. And we've picked a lovely stock image of John Wesley or something, right.
Lauren Miers [00:09:02]:
To pair with that column. That is probably not ripe for Instagram. Definitely not for YouTube. Right. You know, so, you know, medium, of course, but also thinking about the purpose and the audience for each platform. Right. Like some of that is data driven, right. I mean, you could say some of that's qualitative data, right.
Lauren Miers [00:09:21]:
Like we know that Instagram is for personalities, it's for people. Businesses and entities tend to be less effective on that platform unless they are centering people and the stories of people. And so through that lens, you know, that's how we kind of decide what goes on that platform. So doing that for each channel, platform, whatever you want to call it, that you have, and sometimes it does, you know, something goes into multiple lanes, but sometimes something is really just most appropriate to live on social. And that's, that's okay. That has value.
Ryan Dunn [00:09:55]:
Okay. Are there points of data that you're looking at that help you discern whether or not something belongs on a particular platform?
Lauren Miers [00:10:07]:
I see. So the law, the long story of this work is that over the past 10 years we've gone from who can shout the loudest to here's, you know, some how your content or your really programming, right. Less news and communications content, but more like come to this thing. Hey, here's this podcast, right? This stuff that we're. Here's a resource. Things we're generating, how it fits, we made like different lanes, right? And like if your thing fits in lane two, then you're going to get this, this type of marketing, right. So we started, you know, wrangling things into lanes and when we were, you know, in the lane, so to speak, I would make, I still do this today. I write a communication plan, right.
Lauren Miers [00:10:50]:
So I, I write down what we're doing and then we do it. And as we're doing it, and then after we do it, we go back and we say, did this, did this work? Right. So we go and look at the data, right? So it's about creating that feedback loop and Then on the, the user end, right, we've got like behavioral data, you know, how long are they spending on the web page, are they clicking the link to go to the webpage, are they commenting? Right, those kinds of factors. But then for like event based stuff or stuff where they are having to fill out a form, we're asking them how did you hear about this? And it's a checkbox list, so you can check, I want to know all the different places that you remember seeing it. Right? Because marketing world, we know that it takes more than one, you know, kind of hit of, you know, the content for somebody to act on it. And so then we're comparing the plan to what people said they engaged with to get there, you know, or we're looking at it again in, you know, and, or we're looking at it with the web data, the social data, all that kind of stuff. So we're pulling it into this global report, which is really just an Excel sheet, a template that I've made. And so doing that over time has helped us understand like what are the well worn paths to reach our audience, right? And because of, we've reviewed the same data over, you know, the same data, not the same exact data, but like reviewing these data sets around, I wrote a plan and here's how it went for several years.
Lauren Miers [00:12:20]:
We know that people will remember seeing it in email and they will remember a personal invitation and they will remember Facebook and social media, much less, but sometimes they'll see it. So email and personal invitation are our like go tos. So if we're, if we're trying something and we're not quite sure how it's going to land, or as I like to say to folks, when it hits, it hits, right? Like we did an AI event in April and like within 24 hours we had all these people registered, right? Like we knew we'd struck a chord. But sometimes it doesn't land like that immediately. And so because we're familiar with our data, familiar with how to reach our audience, when we're kind of working these plans, promoting something, looking at something, it's really easy to tell quickly like, ooh, that reach wasn't good. Ooh, nobody shared that. Ooh, nobody clicked that link. Or really to me a big red flag is the open rate on the email was good and no one clicked, right? So that tells me that it's getting out there, we're hitting the audience, but there's something about whether it's the copy, the title, the day of the week, right? Like some element of our ask that is not landing correctly with the audience.
Lauren Miers [00:13:30]:
And so then, you know, knowing our habits and our behaviors and then being able to review that against what's happening actively like with this marketing plan informs, you know, the conversation with the ministry area to say this is not going how we thought it was going to go. We've got four weeks left, we got three weeks left. How are we going to pivot this to get you to your definition of success for this event? That's a really long answer to your question.
Ryan Dunn [00:13:58]:
Good though, I get it. And it brings to me a question of looking at all this data. I think some of us tend to miss it because it doesn't feel like such an urgent part of our workflow. Right. You talked about building a communications plan for most of it's probably like we build our communications plan, we get the event out there or the announcement out there, whatever out there and then we gotta get to the next communications plan to get the next thing out there. So what does your workflow look like? Like do you have deliberate postmortem time to kind of look at how things went or. Yeah. What can you reveal for us there?
Lauren Miers [00:14:40]:
So I'm an enneagram5. That's that probably is like what most people need to know. So highly, highly systematized. There's a color coded asana situation that some people in my workshop wanted to see which delighted me, you know, to no end. So I like to say I live and die by a sauna. And for those that don't know, that's project management system and we have a process. Right. And I, I, I always like to say kind of a few disclaimers Here in the Missouri conference, communications is positioned under connectional ministries.
Lauren Miers [00:15:12]:
Right. So we're kind of like our own, you know, ministry area out of our, you know, six to 10 ministry areas. I think that the structure of our staff and conference office makes a difference. Right. So connection ministries, we're really kind of overarchingly involved in what everybody is doing to help bring us together as a unified whole out in an outward facing way. Right. So knowing that, you know, I over the past several years have built this process and it took, I always, the disclaimer is too that it took many years because nobody, nobody loves to hear that. I told the folks in my workshop, right, you're not going to go home and change the whole, like let's understand that, like we're going to learn how to use data specific to one question because nobody's going to go home and Change the whole system.
Lauren Miers [00:16:02]:
It's just not going to happen. But it's been small steps over many years. I know most folks feel like they're lucky to get the thing, you know, two weeks before the thing is happening and then it's an emergency. Right. We have worked really, really hard to limit the emergencies because truly in the conference world there are few true emergencies. Like we could probably count them on one hand every year. And so we have this process and this understanding with all of our ministry areas that 10 weeks from when registration closes, I'm going to, you know, I've got a reminder in Asana, we're going to set up a meeting to have a 30 minute, we call it a creative download about your thing. And all we're going to do is talk about that thing because I learned early on that if we try to wrap it into another regular check in, we're not going to be able to have as rich of a conversation.
Lauren Miers [00:16:56]:
Right. We're not going to have a generative conversation about what, what is the, you know, how great could this thing be that you've dreamt up? And so we do the creative download at 10 weeks. Between 10 and six weeks, because six weeks is when marketing launches. We've learned that between six weeks out from registration, close date is our sweet spot. Again, we learned that with data that most folks were registering in the six week window, opening early doesn't buy as much that giving them extra days on the back end is not helpful either. Right. So it's again, we've built the muscle memory around six weeks. So between that 10 week creative download and six weeks kickoff is when the work of the marketing plan, the art, the webpage, any other special things we've come up with during the creative download, that four week window is when that happens.
Lauren Miers [00:17:52]:
The other thing I think is important to recognize is that like the communication strategy and doing the emails and the website and the social media, like that is all me and within, like within my job scope, like this is like a core part of what I do day in and day out, which I know is not true for every conference and so I really encourage, but it's.
Ryan Dunn [00:18:13]:
Probably true for a lot of our local church communicators that, yeah, they're doing it all.
Lauren Miers [00:18:18]:
Yep. Yes. Other duties as assigned.
Ryan Dunn [00:18:21]:
Yes.
Lauren Miers [00:18:23]:
Uh, I really encourage folks to, you know, think about like what is one habit that you could tack on to what you're already doing to be build a data gathering or data review habit. So like I review our email newsletter, our weekly email newsletter data Every week right before I draft the next one. Cause I'm already on that screen, like I'm going to copy it forward, you know, and then that data hasn't, you know, helps me see, like, oh, hey, that random thing went really well last week. Let's just put that on Facebook too, you know, like just really easy little kind of like one more step type of things instead of let's scrap the.
Ryan Dunn [00:19:00]:
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Ryan Dunn [00:19:46]:
And right now, when you give $200 or more or join our Storyteller Society with a recurring monthly gift of $25 or more, you'll receive a limited edition cross and flame mug as a special thank you. Every time you use it, you'll remember that your gift keeps hope moving forward with real tools, real stories, and real change. Visit umcom.org GT2025 to make your impact today. That is umcom.org GT2025. All right, now back to some more data driven communications with Lauren Miers. The challenge in, in collecting data is that there are so many streams to pull from, especially when you're working across these multiple platforms. So you've mentioned that while you're doing newsletters, you're doing social media. Have your hands on the website.
Ryan Dunn [00:20:45]:
Do you have some tools that helped you to, to collate some of this broad range, or do you have to go into kind of each individual platform and check things out and then pull them into, you know, your magic spreadsheet or wherever that data ends up?
Lauren Miers [00:21:00]:
Yeah, yeah. So they do come from separate sources, but the kind of the global look is on the spreadsheet. Right. So like we're using Sprout Social for social media. It's a little pricey, but we use it because the data reporting is really, really good. It's very robust. It's very easy to access and pull down and then manipulate input wherever. You know, we're on Brick river for email.
Lauren Miers [00:21:23]:
They have a global email report that we Use. We actually pull the whole year's data at the end of every year. I just did that. And we look at the full arc, the full trend. Right. Versus just the campaign specific trend. Let's see. So social is sprout, email is Brick River.
Lauren Miers [00:21:40]:
Google Analytics is where we are. I'm not happy with Google Analytics right now. I'm shopping a different platform, but that's the web data. And then we're using Brick river registration. So I'm pulling out of there as well. And then I, yeah, just collate it into the Excel sheet. And really the point of the Excel sheet is A, a global look, but B, I can PDF that and I can send it to the ministry area and say, here's, here's your report. Right.
Lauren Miers [00:22:03]:
And that, that has other. That's been another thing that's been really helpful for us especially as, you know, we've had to chart some difficult territory sometimes. Right. It's not always easy because, you know, it's at least for me, it's not just like news stories and you know, reporting about events and stuff like that. It's. We're promoting events and content and programming. And so if the, if it's, if we're doing what we know to do to make it work and it's not working, then we're having to have a conversation about was that the right type of programming? And that's a different, harder conversation. And so to have the, what we did documented, to have the how it went documented, especially year over year, to be able to say, hey, that worked last year, let's just pull it forward because we need to do it again, that has been really helpful because then it's not just living like, well, let me log into Sprout for you.
Lauren Miers [00:22:53]:
Right. It's in a shareable format. So even though it takes a few steps to gather all that into one place, I do find that it's worth it.
Ryan Dunn [00:23:01]:
Okay. Has there been a time, Lauren, when you've kind of done your postmortem or end of the year assessment through the data and said, oh, you know, I thought that we were on a trajectory to do this, but it looks like we really need to pivot on our, on our plan here?
Lauren Miers [00:23:19]:
You know, one of our biggest realizations, right, by looking at kind of bigger picture over the over years is we've learned that it is not worthwhile for us to program in March. Right. We have gotten mid campaign and it's, you know, we got three weeks multiple times, got three weeks in. It's like this is not going how we wanted. We're paying for talent, we're bringing talent in, you know, this, that or the other or like our staff is going to go to this location. The registration is just not where we want it to be. Like it's not feeling like a success. Like we're going to have to start making phone calls.
Lauren Miers [00:23:55]:
So that happening year over year, different, you know, ministry disciplines too, right. So cross discipline and then looking at the calendar, right. So that the data from those campaigns and then looking at the calendar to say oh well, in March every different school district in Missouri, every corner takes their turn at spring break when also it's lent. Right. So programming is elevated at the local church. And so over the years we've come to learn like we shouldn't compete with that. My favorite year end revelation though was, you know, we were kind of having this, it was post disaffiliation, having this reckoning with like programming and like who are we now? Post programming disaffiliation. And we had this realization that we were programming like we had a conference full of mid sized suburban churches.
Lauren Miers [00:24:49]:
And that is 100% not true. Right? Like our conference statician could have told you that. He's like, he's like I've known this for forever, you know, and it's like well I don't think that that had sunk in for all of us that we have two thirds of our conference is churches under a hundred and average worship attendance. And so knowing that, right. We can almost build like Personas and archetypes around like okay, so what type of pastor, what do they have? Is it a full time pastor? Is it part time? You know, they're probably bivocational, right? So that means we should probably not be trying to program during the workday and tell them to drive to Columbia because like the bar for them to come to that programming is going to be really high, you know. And so local churches can kind of have this, you know, moment of reckoning as well. Like okay, well who, like what is our age demographic? You know, are folks mostly retired or are they working families? Right. You know, and thinking about like what does life look like for your audience? And then trying to, you know, program both what do they want and then what do we feel as a conference or as a church that they need and figure out how to kind of marry those things with, you know, the, the time and availability of your audience.
Ryan Dunn [00:26:01]:
There some, I guess pet points of data that you have like some favorites that you grab onto. So when talking about social media, you, you Already mentioned shares and link clicks. What are some other, I guess, points of data that over time you've really identified as being. Oh, this, this is a key indicator for me that that something is, is going right.
Lauren Miers [00:26:26]:
Yeah. So those social media data points, I think a high open rate and a high click, click, click rate on a targeted email. So what I mean by a targeted email is we have identified who we think the audience is that is most likely to engage with this thing. Right. And again, I'm talking more about like programmatic promotion. And this applies to churches too, right? You know, who do you think is the most likely attendee of your event? And then we pull that list for, from our data and like our database and then we send them an email and say, and just kind of put like, I don't even do that much, you know, new content writing. Right. It's really a lot of times just like pulling what's on the webpage and putting it in an email.
Lauren Miers [00:27:08]:
So now the webpage is in your inbox and if that did not land, well, that's a red flag for me. Right. So we want to see like our average open rate across the board is 60%, which is like incredible. Um, and so if we're seeing something below 50% open rate or a high open rate and a low click rate, that's a red flag for me. Um, another one would be like, if we get a week or two in and we have a very low amount of registrants that then we're starting to have a conversation about like, maybe do we need to cancel? What does cancellation look like? And if we don't want to cancel, if we've signed a contract with a presenter, then what do we need to do to get it to where it needs to be? And then I think just like one of my favorite pieces of data overall that I really like to use is the how did you hear about this event? Right. That feedback loop piece. And then something we really started to lean into is not, you know, it's not really demographic data. Right.
Lauren Miers [00:28:11]:
I kind of call it the like details about your audience data. Um, but like, you know, are they clergy or are they laity? What is their clergy status? What is their appointment time? Right. Like, I got really curious during our year end data review last week actually and said, what is the breakdown in all of our appointments? Right. Like how many of our appointments are full time? And I found that like the majority are full time, but then the second most common type of appointment is quarter time. Right. So, and that's two Very different audiences.
Ryan Dunn [00:28:39]:
Yeah. Wow.
Lauren Miers [00:28:40]:
And that's like data I get excited.
Ryan Dunn [00:28:42]:
About because that is, it's so interesting.
Lauren Miers [00:28:45]:
Yeah. Fascinating meeting. Right. And it really, you know, indicates just like the stratification of our audience and our churches, but really the people that we're programming for. And so then how does that information change what we're doing?
Ryan Dunn [00:29:00]:
So it sounds like if I can kind of read into a little bit, and maybe I'm hoisting some of my own assumptions on this, which I guess all of us do to some extent, but it, I mean, it sounds like you're using this data not just to really consider the content of what you're posting, but who you're actually connecting with. Like the data is a means for getting to know your audience. Would you say that's accurate?
Lauren Miers [00:29:27]:
Yes. Yeah. I like to say that we're trying to match the right, the thing to the right group of people. Right. The right thing to the right group. And that, that is when hopefully it works. Um, and I think the other thing about knowing your audience is that like, then you know who you're not reaching. Right.
Lauren Miers [00:29:46]:
Somebody said this in my workshop at umac, they were like, how do we reach the young people? I'm like, well, isn't that the age old question? We don't belong on TikTok. We should not be on Snapchat. That's a safeguarding problem. Right. Like, you know, some of these platforms where younger people are not places where church organizations should be. So what does that mean for us and how do we engage with younger people? Right. That's really, for me, the growing edge of our strategy. And so it, I think it's both who is your audience and then who's missing from that.
Lauren Miers [00:30:19]:
From that group.
Ryan Dunn [00:30:20]:
Yeah. Well, that's just fascinating to me because so often we just retreat into this mindset of trying to identify like how the content is performing instead of really functionally using the data to get to know who it is that we're actually connecting with through these. That's good. Well, when you were at umac, did you have some recommendations for people on how they might begin to implement this kind of data driven system?
Lauren Miers [00:30:50]:
Yeah, yeah. I had two kind of key, key takeaways. You know, everybody wanted to see my templates and the system we've built and stuff. And I'm always glad to share it. Right. Like I told the folks on my workshop, you know, I'm always glad to zoom. I'm always glad to talk to you about it. Just know that it took a really long Time, Right.
Lauren Miers [00:31:08]:
It's not an overnight kind of change, but to kind of build the appetite for curiosity. Build the appetite for, you know, the data might show you some stuff that you don't like, right. And you're gonna have to reckon with that. Starting small, asking some very specific questions, right? You know, things like, are, is anybody listening to this podcast? You know who. Or a good one? A really specific one that we were asking a few years ago was, is there overlap between our laity newsletter list and our clergy newsletter list, their opt in subscription lists? We had been designing two completely different newsletters, pulled the data, you know, find duplicates in Excel. Two different audiences. Great. We can stop writing two different emails.
Lauren Miers [00:31:59]:
You know, we can keep most of the content the same and change a few things, right? So that, that affected our work and the time I was spending on that. So asking really specific questions, identifying what data you would need and what data you already have to answer those questions and then rinse and repeat as applicable. So that's kind of one bucket, then the other bucket is building just one small habit, right? So like thinking about if you're already in the email screen, just pulling that data down into an Excel sheet so that you can look at it over time. We are going through a kind of refresh of our conference publication. We're moving from monthly to quarterly starting in 2026 after many years. And, you know, that means the bar for what goes in print is going to be a lot higher. And so I found myself, actually after my own workshop at umac, asking what kind of stories are people interested in? And I realized that because I've been pulling this email data, taking less than five minutes to pull it into an Excel sheet. Over the past year, I already had all of that data from my weekly newsletter that I could look at and kind of group things into categories and say, oh, people are really interested in hearing from the bishop in this format, or they're really interested in local church stories or events or, you know, that kind of thing.
Lauren Miers [00:33:13]:
And so we're looking at that and kind of letting that marinate and grappling with that moving forward. So I would say, you know, asking specific questions and then also building just small little routine habits to review your data.
Ryan Dunn [00:33:27]:
Well, you did mention that sometimes the data tells us things that we don't want to hear. Certainly that's true for us is where the firsthand looking at the data. But then we also have the responsibility of maybe bringing that information to other people. Do you have some recommendations about how we get other people on board with being open, receptive to hearing what the data sometimes reveal.
Lauren Miers [00:33:52]:
Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously all of it is undergirded by relationship. Right. I also, again, the disclaimer about how connectional ministries and communications is positioned in our staff, I think makes a big difference. Like, I'm already in regular conversation with all the ministry areas, but, you know, building that trust and relationship to say, like, I am here to make sure that you're, that you get your desired result. Right? That is my job to take this thing you've dreamt up and imagine and feel called to do and deliver it to the right audience. Right. I am, you know, the conduit here for your thing. And because you're trusting me with that thing, I want to know what success looks like for you.
Lauren Miers [00:34:35]:
We have done, we've not done the best job of identifying that for everything. That's something I'm going to work on actually in the next year. Like, are we hitting our outcomes? Can we do more to measure those? Can we pre survey, post survey? You know, how can we get more data? But because I have this, this relationship with all of our ministry areas and we've, you know, there's an understanding that communications is doing their best to get your thing out to then come back and say, here's some hard numbers compared to how things regularly go. In my expert opinion on our communications data, things are not looking so hot. How does this feel to you? Right? So saying, here's the facts. How does that land for you? You know, and sometimes like, so I guess I would say I use the data as a way to open the conversation, right? That's my conversation starter for maybe this is going to be a little bit of a hard conversation. But I also enter the conversation knowing that, like, I'm just giving you these facts and I don't necessarily, I don't have the authority to tell you whether or not to do your thing, right? Like, if you want to, if you want to go ahead, like, okay, then what do we need to do? Let me think about what I could do potentially. And sometimes we come back a few weeks later and I'm like, I've done everything I can and we're still here.
Lauren Miers [00:35:52]:
So now what? Right. I find that the data is really just kind of this neutral, you know, thing to present without feelings. Right. You know, and I think, gosh, with church work, it's all about the feelings. And if you're in the local church, it's all about politics, right? Like, it, it's, it's a real thing. Like let's, let's name that so.
Ryan Dunn [00:36:13]:
Well, Lauren, thanks so much for sharing your experience with us. Any final thoughts that you want to share with our audience?
Lauren Miers [00:36:19]:
I love to talk about this topic, so if anybody wants to chat, hit me up and probably put my email in the show notes. Yeah, Missouri really views themselves as an open, open source conference and so I'm glad to share templates and PowerPoint slides and resources and, you know, anything that relates to this topic to help folks along on the on the journey. Cause I really do think that this is one way that we can work smarter and not harder. And we need so much of that today as we're kind of, you know, grappling with these realities of shrinking staff and, you know, still not enough time.
Ryan Dunn [00:36:54]:
So as always, thank you for taking this journey with us in the MYCOM Church Communications and Marketing Podcast. Just a little reminder that when you sponsor a college student through the United Methodist Higher Education Foundation's Dollars for Scholars Program, we help match Funds up to $4,000. Partner with us to make a huge impact on the lives of Methodist students and the UM related colleges, universities and seminaries they hope to attend. Visit UM H now to learn more. MYCOM is a production of United Methodist Communications and it comes out monthly. I want to thank Renee McNeil, Patty Dellabovi, and Andrew Schleicher for production and marketing support on this episode. My name is Ryan Dunn and I'll be chatting at you again in a few weeks. Peace.