Grow Your Denomination or Diocese
Develop thriving churches. Equip effective leaders.
Plot the location of every congregation and church agency in your region and learn the real and potential reach and community penetration for your denomination or diocese.
Make more informed decisions about:
Long-Range Planning & Priorities
Urbanization and centralization are transforming American cities and churches must adapt and regional resources must shift. MissionInsite can help you determine essential demographic and lifestyle trends for your region now and into the next ten years.
- Assess—A People Plot for every congregation allows regional planners to see the geographical overlaps of church influence and the gaps in denominational representation.
- Analyze—Build your own reports that emphasize the most significant trends in populations and households by looking at key data: transportation corridors and community services, poverty and wealth, age and income, racial diversity and primary languages, family structure and marital status, school jurisdictions and zip codes, and many other demographic categories.
Clergy Deployment
Regional agencies face diminishing personnel resources and increasingly diverse community contexts. Hard decisions must be made, like to deploy clergy full or part time or to serve single or multiple parishes. The challenge to place clergy in community contexts where they can be most effective is growing every year. The internal needs of the church, and the external challenges to mission are often very different.
Equip—ComparativeInsite reports will help incoming clergy compare and contrast ministry and leadership expectations between church members and the wider community. They can anticipate the stress of change and plan ahead to focus sermons and set pastoral care priorities.
- Understand—ExecutiveInsite and MinistryInsite reports help regional church leaders understand social and moral perspectives in the community and identify top life concerns and program preferences.
- Match—Better appoint clergy with relevant skills and customize continuing education strategies.
Church Planting
Discover where you should start a new church and what resources it will require.
Meet Local Needs—A People Plot for every congregation allows regional planners to see the gaps in denominational presence, and the potential to partner with a nearby congregations to provide financial and volunteer support.
Learn About Communities—Neighbor Center allows you to plot community households by gender, marital status, head of household age, children, income, length of residence, owners and renters, dwelling type, ethnicity and lifestyle … and zoom in for detailed information.
Find Opportunities—Thematic mapping of lifestyle segment representation in the region helps identify the leading edge of urbanization often revealed by high population densities of young singles or young families where a new church might have the greatest opportunity.
Visualize and Map—Satellite and street views for specific areas help planners select the perfect location for a new church building accessible and visible in key transportation routes and housing developments.
Understand Your Communities Better
“MissionInsite has become a great place for us to understand the community so that we can then help guide the congregations to see new ways to do missions. MissionInsite is a vital tool that I need in congregation vitality as well as our churches need to do ministry.”
—Beth Potter, congregational vitality
Innovative Short-term Outreach
Movements like Fresh Expressions and other focused outreach ministries from Catholic Charities or denominational agencies are increasingly effective in contexts with highly mobile populations. Precise location, trained leadership, a creative programming are crucial to success. Whether or not these lead to membership growth, the mission impact and public credibility of the diocese or denomination increases.
Locate—Use MissionInsite to zoom in for pinpoint accuracy to identify the precise locations with the highest population density of target publics to locate mission.
Strategize—Neighbor Center allows you to plot community households by gender, marital status, head of household age, children, income, length of residence, owners and renters, dwelling type, ethnicity and lifestyle … and zoom in for detailed information.
Customize—Use the MissionImpact Mosaic Application Guide to customize program strategies for communication, hospitality, social service, and Christian mentoring for specific lifestyle segments.
- Measure—Use the Experian E-Handbook and the MissionImpact Mosaic Application Guide to define unique measureable outcomes to determine the success of out-of-the-box ventures.
Mission-Driven Church Mergers
Identify which congregations have the greatest potential to jointly create a congregation that will grow spiritually and numerically.
Find—Use ComparativeInsite reports to find congregations with similar proportionate lifestyle representation, which have greater potential for mutual understanding and support.
- Combine—A People Plot for every congregation allows regional planners to see the geographical overlaps of church membership, and the potential to combine the resources of multiple churches in a location readily accessible to everyone.
- Blend—Use Opportunity Scans to explore population densities most compatible with current congregational expectations for demographic categories (e.g. populations by race, culture, country of origin, and language, etc.) and lifestyle groups (e.g. seniors, singles, young families, empty-nesters etc.)
Relevant Long-term Outreach
Regional planners need to adapt long-time outreach ministries to changing circumstances and initiate and sustain new outreach programs in changing communities.
Seek—The ReligiousInsite report will reveal top life concerns and social issues for specific locations in the region.
Find—Thematic mapping for lifestyle segments and lifestyle groups can target specific neighborhoods or regions with high population densities related to social issues.
Go—Customized Opportunity Scans can identify locations with multi-cultural and/or racial diversity to locate affirmative action and reconciliation ministries.
- Reach—Neighbor Center allows you to identify community households by gender, marital status, head of household age, children, income, length of residence, owners and renters, dwelling type, ethnicity and lifestyle to target communication and fundraising.
Identify Prospects for Ministry
“Any time we plant an ethnic church, we look at MissionInsite first to identify prospects for that ministry. Recently, we had a Vietnamese church that was relaunching after seeing their community change over the years. After studying the area, we identified a couple hundred possible Vietnamese families. We saw several families come to the Lord because of that information.”
—Tom Crites, Research Consultant
Diversity and Multi-Cultural Church Development
Regional leaders are prioritizing church development that is authentically diverse and multi-cultural. This enriches the spiritual depth and liturgical practice of church members, and encourages respect and understanding in communities. The challenge is to customize communication systems, equip bi-lingual leadership, and customize print and video resources for worship and education.
Cross-check—Customize Opportunity Scans can identify locations with high racial or ethnic population densities, and ComparativeInsite reports can compare this with lifestyle representation in existing churches.
Identify—Neighbor Center allows you to identify community households by country of origin and ethnicity, and customized demographic research can provide percentage of racial and ethnic populations and trends, incomes, populations, and primary language spoken at home.
Plan—Customized demographic research provides a cultural diversity index to find the best opportunities for bi-racial and multi-cultural church plans and outreach ministries.
Camps, Retreat Centers, Generational Ministries
Regions often staff and support camps, retreat centers, and specific ministries for youth, singles, and seniors. The challenges include upgrading facilities for multi-generational use, training staff (i.e. specialized counselors, chaplains, and volunteers), and adapting programs for evolving interests.
Identify—Neighbor Center allows you to identify community households by age and family status who are most likely to be interested in specialized ministries of the region.
Target—Donor Center allows you to identify potential givers, inkind givers, and givers with varying degrees of commitment to target advertising and fundraising.
Segment—Experian research identifies recreational habits for different lifestyle segments, and the MissionImpact Mosaic Application Guide helps identify specific lifestyle groups that include large proportions of youth, seniors, or singles to customize programs.
Christian Schools
Many regional agencies and diocese support faith-based elementary, middle, and high schools. These can appeal to families both within and outside denominational membership or church participation. Yet advertising is difficult because families are increasingly mobile and average residencies are getting shorter, and there are growing challenges for financial support.
Reveal—Different mapping views reveal boundaries by zip code, county, and school board to help target advertising and develop transportation strategies.
Serve—Opportunity Scans can identify specific neighborhoods or areas the high proportions of people with no religious affiliation, or who affiliate with your particular tradition or denomination.
Engage—Neighbor Center allows you to identify community households by age and family status who are most likely to be interested in specialized ministries of the region, and you can identify neighborhood or areas by length of residency.
Mediation and Conflict Resolution
Regional agencies are spending more and more time resolving pastoral relations conflicts and mediating disagreements over property renovations, changing worship expectations, and adaptive program priorities. Much of this can be addressed with accurate demographic information and increased empathy for different lifestyle segments.
Empathize—Thematic mapping by lifestyle segments helps you anticipate stress arising from different expectations on schools, health, social service, and emergency services to identify specific churches with potential to experience higher stress.
Guide—Use the MissionImpact Mosaic Application Guide to help different lifestyle segments better understand the spiritual needs and life concerns that drive changing expectations in worship practices, educational methods and curricula, outreach emphases, and facility renovations and technology upgrades.
Anticipate—Use Experian research and MissionImpact Mosaic Application Guide to appoint pastoral leadership that is best prepared to meet future community needs.
Regional or National Access
MissionInsite empowers you to better understand your organization and community by leveraging demographics and engagement analytics. Our individual, regional and national subscriptions unlock all the features from plotting members and donors to forecasting trends before they happen. Community information is available for any custom geography anywhere in the United States.
Learn more about how MissionInsite’s solutions can help your faith-based organization.
Trusted by Hundreds of National & Regional Church Agencies
Since 2007, more than 230 national and regional church agencies around the country representing over 125,000 faith-based organizations have utilized MissionInsite’s unique fusion of your organization’s data, our comprehensive set of community demographic data, technology and analytics to reveal solutions to your organization’s greatest strategic challenges. From a small church or faith-based institution to a larger regional or national agency, MissionInsite’s faith-based solutions empower churches, temples and other faith-based institutional leadership with timely and trusted information and tools to better serve their communities.
Big data for big decisions.
Make the best possible decisions with the best possible information.
Focus
- Understand the dynamics of different cities and counties across any state.
Combine
- Blend demographic data from multiple regions to identify new opportunities.
Coordinate
- Learn how regional demographics, attitudes, beliefs relate to the country at large.