We hear a lot about data in the news—whether that’s major data breaches or ways to protect your personal information stored on your phone or computer. But when it comes to your church data, it’s equally important to abide by some church data management practices to ensure that your members’ information is secure, accurate, and usable.
Let’s dive into some of our top data management practices for churches. All these best practices can be done for free, so you don’t have to invest in new software or protections, saving your church money!
Prioritize Security
Your top priority when collecting, storing, and processing data—especially when it pertains to your members, their giving, and any other sensitive data—should be to protect that important information. Cybersecurity is important when you are processing any sort of data.
There are many ways to keep your church data more secure, but you should always ensure your passwords are secure. This simple step can help prevent hackers from accessing private information in your account. Many data management systems have two-factor authentication, which requires you to log in to your account with a code that is sent to your phone or email (in addition to your user ID and password), to further deter hackers trying to access your account.
Additionally, always get permission from your members to process their data; you can even let your members choose what information they would like to be processed. You can also allow them to choose whom information is shared with—for example, some members might not want their personal phone number made public in the church directory where others can see it.
Keep It Clean
No, this doesn’t involve soap and water! Keeping your data clean means ensuring that there are no errors, duplicate entries, or incorrect formatting. These types of mistakes (that can easily happen in data entry) can lead to skewed data or even mess up your entire data set.
To keep your data clean, you should have processes in place to double-check all data entries after they’re entered—ideally by someone different from who entered the data in the first place.
Church management softwares often have checks in place to let you know if data is duplicated or formatted incorrectly. This can help you and your staff ensure that data issues are addressed promptly and easily!
Ensure It’s Usable
If your data is clean and secure but no one can understand or use it, then it’s not good data! There’s little point in having abundant data if no one is ever using it. To make your data easier to digest, you could display it as a chart or graph, or simply outline the overall picture (average weekly attendance, etc.).
If you use a church management system, it will likely be equipped with features to show you your data in a way that’s easy to understand—like charts, graphs, or summaries. If you use something like Microsoft Excel to organize and house your data, you can easily turn rows of data into charts or graphs. Either way, you should be able to easily understand your databases in a church management software or spreadsheet!
Collect Only What’s Necessary
If you’ve recently invested in a new church management software, you might be tempted to collect every piece of information possible about your people—you might as well get your money’s worth! But part of managing your data correctly is ensuring that the information you’re collecting is relevant to what you need.
So collecting your members’ baptismal date, attendance information, and giving history are necessary points of data that will help you connect with your members and understand the life of your church. However, you might decide that your specific church doesn’t need to collect your members’ home phone numbers, because everyone has a cell phone. Or perhaps you don’t need email addresses for every member of the household—you just need one primary email.
Limit User Access
Finally, you should limit who has access to data within your organization. If you have a small staff, with just your pastor and an administrative assistant, you’ll probably give both staff members complete access! If you have a larger staff, you should limit access to only those who actually need to access or process data in their duties.
In addition, you should explicitly state who actually has ownership over the data. This means that you should clearly outline who is responsible for managing and processing your data, which can help you figure out the root of any challenges you might have with your data management or errors.
The Bottom Line
Data management is crucial for any organization, but especially for churches. By implementing these top data management best practices, you can easily ensure that your church protects your members’ data, understands the life of your church through that data, and prioritizes what’s most important for your office staff.
These data management practices fit seamlessly into Church360° Members. Start a trial today and see how easy church management software can be!
