I’m familiar with the live stream stats for Facebook and Youtube. I’m curious if anyone uses any sort of conversion factor to figure out how many people are watching if you include the household.
I just used our church management software (Rock) and looked at the avg number of people in our active families over 7th grade. We use a count of one with Facebook but for our website and YouTube we are looking at using a multiplication of that number for a more realistic count.
We figure out how many connections there are (our stream provider offers some of this, as does FB and YT) and apply a couple different multipliers depending on whether we are sheltering at home or not.
1.6 is the number we use to calculate bodies-per-connection (nee: multiplier) that we use pre-shelter. Lately, we’ve used 2.2. Both are on the conservative side considering the number and size of families we have in our congregation. I’ve heard of other churches using 1.8 and 2.5, respectively…
I hope that helps!
It depends on the type of program being streamed for us. For our “Daily Devotional Chats” from the Pastor (Avg. Length around 5-6 minutes) we use no multiplier since they are primarily consumed on a iPhone/iPad or similar mobile device. For our weekly worship service which substitutes for our in-person Sunday Worship Service, we use the Average Household Population for our primary zip code (easily found for any community at Census.Gov) since those are typically being watched by families together, many times on their main big-screen TV. My main recommendation would be to not focus so much on a multiplier, but to just pick your standard metric and then use it consistently from week to week to determine your trends over time. Are you getting better or worse? What are your retention rates as compared to your View counts? The metric is just a metric - just as counting heads in a church worship center doesn’t reflect whether people are actually paying attention to the weekly sermon or not, a “Views” count from Facebook or YouTube doesn’t reflect engagement either, Be intentional in designing ways to ENGAGE with your members/viewers and then develop the means to track those in a way that is useful to you.
For weekly worship services, consider the following:
- A number of megachurches and multisite churches compared notes on attendance tracking at a recent TCN Regional Roundtable meeting. They had each done a study of the average number of people per carload coming into their parking lots for worship services, and each had come up with a number just under 2.1 average.
- A good multiplier might be your average number of people in a worship service carload. If you haven’t done that kind of study, use their number! Perhaps 2.15 x the number of online attendees.
Our online team has been using 2.4 as their multiplier.
We do Zoom meetings for weekly worship. By headcount of looking at families online, we have a figure of between 1.4 and 1.6 per connections when taking phones into account (which are normally a single person). My best guess for our older congregation, with fewer children, is 1.4
Just this past week ECFA had an article where they said experts put the multiplier between 1.5 and 2.2.