Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

ECF Vital Practices launched in October 2010 and since that time we've been surveying our readers regularly to find out how we can improve this new, online resource. My colleague Anne Ditzler wrote about initial findings here. In this post, I want to share some of the intriguing feedback we've received from our Jan/Feb and Mar/Apr surveys.  Who are our readers?
The majority of our readers are lay people who describe themselves as “very active” in their congregations. As one might expect given the demographics of the Episcopal Church, most are members of small to mid-sized congregations. In Jan/Feb, ordained leaders constituted 32% of our survey respondents; in Mar/Apr this was 39%.

Vestry Papers: Useful to Very Useful
This was good news. When we asked readers to rate how useful the Jan/Feb and Mar/Apr issues of Vestry Papers were to them, well over 90% indicated that these issues were “useful” to “very useful.” In fact, a quarter of our respondents in both Jan/Feb and Mar/Apr described us as “very useful.”

How can we improve future issues of Vestry Papers?
We asked readers to give us honest feedback on how we might improve future issues of Vestry Papers. In response to our Jan/Feb issue, 45% of respondents asked for there to be a stronger connection between our Vestry Papers articles and related tools & resources. In response to the Mar/Apr issue, 50% of respondents asked us to include more articles written by congregational or grassroots leadership. For both our Jan/Feb and Mar/Apr surveys, the second-highest recommendation was that we have an increased practical focus.

How might we improve ECF Vital Practices overall?
This was loud and clear. For both Jan/Feb and Mar/Apr, over half of our survey respondents said we needed to have an increased practical focus across all sections of the website.

What areas have you needed help/guidance in?
We want to make sure that the content we are producing matches real needs. In both surveys, therefore, we’ve made it a point to ask what area folks have needed the most help/guidance in during the past six months. In Jan/Feb, a majority of respondents named the areas of communications and vestry. In Mar/Apr, a majority named finance.

Interestingly, when we segmented responses by lay or ordained, clergy respondents cited “managing change” most frequently whereas lay respondents cited “vestry” most frequently.

Has this led to change?
One of our hopes in these surveys is to find out if/when we are leading to concrete change and how we might do so more often in the future. Through our Jan/Feb and Mar/Apr surveys, we are starting to get some sense of this. When asked “Have you done something new or in a new way as a result of ECF Vital Practices?”, 46% of our Jan/Feb respondents and 39% of our Mar/Apr respondents said yes. This included everything from including photos of one’s church family on congregational newsletters to working to eliminate “parking lot talk.”

Things got truly interesting, though, when we segmented responses by lay and ordained. 58% of lay responders in Jan/Feb and 43% of lay responders in Mar/Apr said they’d done something new. This is significantly higher than the numbers of ordained leaders who said they'd done something new: 22% in Jan/Feb and 33% in Mar/Apr. These figures speak to a core belief that in order to implement change in a congregation, one needs to speak to the entire leadership team.