We believe every Sunday counts. Kids Ministry is now more demanding. Church leaders have to get a video experience ready for families to watch at home. Creating videos for families at home can take time, and often, there is no true north for what success looks like each Sunday. How do you know if your church is thriving, reaching families at home? How do you know if your content is engaging and watched regularly?
Questions like this come up often as we work with the thousands of Churches across the country. That's why we created the analytics dashboard inside of Playlister. Now you have data from your at-home experiences. This article's purpose is to highlight what you do with that data to define success. Good news, you don't have to be a data scientist to figure out if you are successful. Employing Occam's razor (the simplest explanation tends to be correct) to evaluating families viewing habits at home, has pinpointed two metrics that correlate to success:
Success metric 1 - How many families watch
Success metric 2 - How much do they watch
What does success mean for how many families are watching? Think about how you measure success every Sunday at your church before COVID. Let's start with how many families show up to the church. If you have 1,000 families in your church, was a successful Sunday when 250 came to your kids' services? That means you are expecting on any given Sunday 25% of your families.
According to National surveys conducted by Gallup polls, about 37% of your church's families will come to church at least once in 30 days. Now let's apply that thinking to your virtual data. The first metric you see is Total Unique Views; think of this number as your family count.
Success Metric 1 = 27-37% of your families watch videos at home. So how many families do you have? 50? Ok, then success would mean 13-18 families are watching your content.
Please note. Most churches feel like they are failing if ALL their families aren't watching. 100% adoption is unrealistic. Anything above 25% is fantastic and cause for celebration.
What does success mean for how much content families are watching? This watch time is a break-thru data point and one that Netflix relies heavily on when analyzing its content. A higher number here means that families are engaged and watching your content. On the Playlister analytics dashboard, we call this data point: Average Completion. The average completion means how far a family gets through a playlist that they begin watching.
Success Metric 2 = Your families should be completing on average 70% of your playlist(s).
Please note. 70% completion rate is hard to achieve. Hitting that goal takes engaging content and the right amount of content in your videos. Remember, most cartoons for Kids on Netflix are 20-26 minutes long for a reason. Try to make your lessons around 20 minutes and keep it engaging with your team's short introductions to the videos and mixing in the amazing content from our partners at Orange.