Metrics: Seat Turns
Honoring God with a wise use of resources is very important to me. Because of this value, we have never tried to build (or purchase) large buildings so we could have everyone in one (or two) experiences.
Instead, we consider our use of a building more successful if we are using it five, or six, or seven times on a weekend (as opposed to once or twice.)
An interesting metrics is to measure how many times one “seat” is used. To find this number, take your total adult weekend attendance and divide it by total seating capacity.
Let’s say you have 400 people worshiping in three weekend experiences. If your worship space has 200 seats, each seat is used 2 times. You have 2 seat turns.
(Our highest number of seat turns at a campus has been 4.25)
The higher the number of turns, the better steward you’re being of the building. (In my opinion, many churches are building or relocating when they could be focusing on more seat turns.)
Your thoughts?
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My thoughts are PREACH ON! Craig, You hit the nail on the head! This would mean however more work for more people…are they up for the challenge? How do you avoid burnout?
I love it. That’s why I’m all about being portable. Avoiding a building altogether, at least for as long as possible, allows you to devote resources in a far more impactful way.
I’m working under the assumption that unchurched/dechurched/seekers are only going to show up at certain times: between 9-12 on a Sunday morning and MAYBE Saturday night. If that is true, then using your space outside those times is going to be a believer focused activity. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just not a measure of missional effectiveness. I agree that building big new facilities is not necessarily the best use of resources, but I would rather measure how many seats we have available during “prime time” to connect people to Jesus.
Jenn asked how we avoid burnout… Great question. We ask our campus teams to take one weekend off ever two months (on top of their normal vacations). We also try hard to guard our day off.
Patrick, Glad to hear you love portable! It is an awesome way to reach people! (Too many people think it is all about the building.)
Mark, I was under the same assumption that you mentioned. In our context, we’ve simply found the assumption wrong. We have tons of people meet Christ on Saturday, Sunday early, and Sunday evening. Perhaps our biggest place for non-believers to attend is at Sunday 1:00 p.m. experiences.
Wow, measuring seat turns…I’ve never thought about that. But you’re right, it’s a good way to measure how effective we are at managing the resources God has given us and getting the most out of them.
Brad Ruggles
http://www.bradruggles.com
I wonder how energy consumption factors into that, though. Would it be more cost/resource efficient to run a smaller system of lights, sound, HVAC, etc. for five weekend services - or run a larger system only once or twice? Just a thought.
Craig,
You may be addressing this later in the week. What do you do about office space as you grow? Do some people work from home or Starbucks?
Is this idea not the very principle that Movie plex operate off of? They are interested in turning seats of each showing as close to each other as they can. ITs a brilliant idea thanks for putting this to paper so a not so active church can think of it differently!
Lex, I think energy consumption is minimal compared to construction costs of a much larger building.
Kevin, We try not to build unless necessary. (We prefer to buy existing buildings.) Office space is not a huge priority. We have found leasing office space to be a good option.
DB, Yes, movie theaters and restaurants are good examples.
As someone who is not in full time ministry, but hopes to be someday and enjoys the articles, I find this concept pretty interesting. I heard that after the sanctuary is about 80% full that it’s difficult to get new people to come. Have you found that true?
I have a long running question that I have been trying to figure out when it comes to the multi-service weekend. How do we accurately count attenders in each service? More specifically, is it fair to count those who stick around for 2, 3 or more services? And in light of this discussion would that limit the number of seat turns? I guess that I am concerned that sometimes we might be decieving ourselves with these numbers…if we could arrive at a real number…I’d really like to hear how others take this into account or if this is even an issue at all.
Interesting concept that I think is lost on most churches (including ours).
Our church is planning on building even though we are at just a little less than 1 seat turn per weekend in the sanctuary. Our biggest crunch is in educational space. I guess we could have multiple educational hours but then we run into another (possibly bigger) problem, namely a lack of volunteers.
Craig your answer to avoiding burn out seems to assume that your worship team is all paid staff. I assume that LifeChurch didn’t start out with all paid staff, how did you avoid burnout when still relying on volunteers? Did you not run multiple services at that time?
Jessica,
Many of us have heard that, and I have found it to be reliable. That one fact was probably the driving reason as to why we decided to add a second service; though you would have to ask someone smarter than I to find out why that happens. The conversation never ends about how many chairs should be put out…
Kenyon,
I have had that same thought, though I have no answer. I just assumed that counting people multiple times is something you have to deal with. Maybe that is wrong. This may be incorrect also, but don’t most people who stay multiple times serve somewhere. I doubt many people sit through a repeat message. It seems you are likely to find the repeats in the kids area or coffee shop.
Brandon
Brandon
Craig and Lex:
OK, this is probably totally stupid to most people - but i’ve embarrassed myself on here before, why stop now.
the energy consumption thing - there is a 90% chance that you are savings $’s (but probably not energy) having multiple services at one location on one day. The reason is kW demand you use in relation to your energy (kWh) use - we’ll just leave it at that.
come to think of it - it’s called ‘load factor’ in the energy biz - very, very simliar to the LC seat turn metric or airline industry seat churn.
kenyon - i struggled with this as we merged with LC then i realized it didn’t matter. it seemed to be cheating to count one person 2 or three times - like band members, the soud guy, or even staff.
in the end, you are just trying to get a handle on a metric - by ceating a benchmark kinda thing.
In my day job, we’ve found that the best opportunity to help churches become more “green” is to grasp this concept. As construction costs escalate, the days of being able to have a big room that is only used one morning a week are fading fast.
The challenge for architects and consultants (my day job) is going to be to find creative ways to maximize what churches already own–and as you mentioned–to be able to adaptively reuse spaces such as shopping centers, etc. We are also seeing a lot of cool projects on the design table that are shared between churches and the communities in which they serve.
By the way, if you are into metrics there are some cool free tools in the resources section of Strategic Dimensions website at http://www.strategicdimensions.com/worship_resources.htm
Mark –
Even if your assumptions were true, it is still a measure of missional effectiveness. What our campus pastor has us do, for example, for big events like Easter, is tell the regular attenders to come at a different time to make room for the people who are more likely to be guests. Even if you only sat 100 people in a place, if you had your regular attenders at other times, and filled those 100 seats with new guests, I’d say that would be pretty effective!
But I’ll also agree with Craig and say that those times are not the only effective times for outreach, although it may be the most effective time for someone just wandering by.
I actually never knew of that metric… I have a question: who comes up with these measuring sticks? And how?
This is a great series, I actually talked about this some on my site in a 2 part (so far) article I am calling “Church intelligence”
I would love to get peoples thoughts and maybe include some of this info in my next part if nobody minds and link back where needed.
Here is the link:
Church Intelligence
Keith
As a worship pastor currently at a one service church I am longing, praying, and working my tail off to grow to a multi service church.
Why?
Among other reasons - to leverage band practice time.
When the band (all volunteers except me) practices music for the week it becomes difficult to motivate them to really strive for excellence when you are only playing one service. I have AMAZING volunteers, that’s just the reality. The more services you play means you get to leverage the time you spent practicing those songs that week. Essentially, how hard would you work on a song when you knew you were only going to play it once vs. when you know you will have an opportunity to play that song multiple times?
With that said, I am also curious about Matt King’s question and how you addresses the issues of volunteers and multiple services:
When relying on volunteers how many services can you do before you are burning them out? Is you whole worship team paid staff? Do you use multiple volunteer teams on the same weekend?
Matt asked, “Craig your answer to avoiding burn out seems to assume that your worship team is all paid staff. I assume that LifeChurch didn’t start out with all paid staff, how did you avoid burnout when still relying on volunteers? Did you not run multiple services at that time?”
We started paying band members once we had four experiences (on two days). We paid them because we wanted to honor their time.
We chose to use the same band for the whole weekend. I know many churches who use multiple bands on multiple days and do it well.
Not on staff so I am speaking on pure opinion.
Our church bought the land, no loan, for a much larger building. But then I saw our new building schedule and we won’t move in until 2020.
I get this feeling that somewhere along the way (or from the word go) wanted to be better stewards of the resources we had.
We opened up another campus. Our attendance increased.
This weekend, our seat turn will be about 16+. On average, conservatively, I am thinking 9+.
So wise and well said.
We are building new building but for multiple use. We will hit the ground running with multiple services. Here is my question: what about a church that is mobile? We have been doing mobile church for 5 years and burnout is an issue not so much for the staff but for the volunteers…specifically the set up guys. Any Ideas? We will be in our current mobile situation for another year. We run 3 services on the weekend and are thinking about a 4th.
What if we’d suggest that stewardship is more about stewarding the sheep than it is about stewarding God’s cattle?
Moreover, Willow Creek recently revealed that apparently attendance doesn’t produce disciple-makers.
Here in Indy, we’re considering what really MIGHT drive godly success and accomplish the Great Commission in our city…
http://cityreaching.pbwiki.com/Indy%20Scorecard
Craig - interesting post. It has triggered something that I have been thinking a lot about. Just courious as to how committed people are to a given worship congregation/family when multiple worship expereinces are offered? We have intentionally limited the number of services at each location to a single worship experience. Where each location is a separate and distinct church family/body that at the same time is connected to other “sister” churches through a common DNA and leadership. Each church works in concert with their “sisters” to build the kingdom but at the same time each is separate and distinct. Kind of like a symphony of churches I guess. So in essence it’s not “one church in multiple locations” but rather “multiple churches meeting in multiple locations that are working together to build His kingdom.” In essense, this is a many-to-many relationship vs. a one-to-many that in theory should result in an ever increasing exponential impact (at least to a point until the laws of complexity set in).
Our fear is that going to multiple services in a given location will inhibit the relational cohesiveness of a given congregation/family. No numbers to back this up - just our thought at this point. Craig, what has been your experience when it comes to offering multiple services in the same location - especially on the same day? Do you find that people “waffle” between the services or are they able to connect and grow effectively?
In thinking about seat turnover, I wonder what the relationship is to worker turnover from a business perspective? What is the realtionship of retention to turnover? Just thinking out loud. I’d love to hear your thoughts. I appreciate your heart and your outside-the-box thinking.
Chris,
Great questions. Our philosophy is quite a bit different from yours (although I totally respect what you are doing).
We never open a campus without at least two experiences. We rely more on the midweek Life Groups to drive the intimacy than the weekend experiences.
We have found that for the most part, people do come to the same weekend experiences. The biggest reason they might change experiences for the weekend is when they have a conflict of schedules. The good thing is, they can still go to worship with other believers just on a different day or time.
At what point do you add another service? Do you have a metric for that? LOVE YOUR HEART FOR PEOPLE
Curt asked, “At what point do you add another service?”
Great question. I wish I had a simple formula to answer, but I don’t.
Here are some factors we consider:
1) How old is the campus? (The newer it is the faster we’ll typically add.
2) What time of year is it? (We usually grow most in January and August and less in May/June.) It would be rare that we’d add an experience before a typical valley time.
3) What is the spiritual climate? Is God doing something that you can simply “feel” or sense or see? If so, we’d be more aggressive.
4) Where can you move people? For example, if we have a Sunday 10 a.m. that is full by an 8:30 that is half empty, I’d move people to 8:30 before adding a 1:00 p.m. or Saturday night.
5) Once we’ve moved people and are hitting about 80% capacity, we tend to add.
We are not as worried about having a half full (or much less) experience.
Ultimately, we consider these factors, but the decision is born out of time with God. Sometimes, I’ll ignore all the indications and go with what I believe God is saying.
I find this to be a very inspiring post!
Though my background is inventory, procurement, etc. I’ve not even thought to adapt those principals to church metrics like this too.
Great idea to adapt common business metrics like inventory turnover and just in time capacity planning to improve our stewardship. This has me thinking for sure.
This is such an important principle, and a great way to explain it. It’s frustrating and sad seeing churches bite off more than they can chew in debt so they can seat more people in one service when they can expand their weekend to 2 or 3 services and double possibly triple their attendance and add significantly to their financial base. We have done this in LaGrange, GA. We run 2 Sunday AM services, and are about to add a Saturday Evening service. IT WORKS!!! Love your stuff Craig…
[...] So, all of this is going through my mind when I come across this blog post from Craig Groeschel. I had never considered the issue of multiple services from a stewardship perspective. Check out what Craig writes about “seat turns.” [...]
Craig, I have two questions. When you add services, do you always add full kids ministries or do you just add nursery? Also, what is your kids ministry format like with back-to-back services? If their parents serve one and attend one, do the kids get the same teaching back-to-back?
I like this stuff about ’seat turns’ as a helpful way to work out need for venues and facilities - we are a small church in AUSTRALIA - regularly at or over 85% now for many months (thought sometimes even at 105% capacity on Sunday mornings) - and I can see the argument that a seat turn of 3 or 4 is a better guide than the old 85% full- BUT I am after advice though about when other issues (admin space - and for us mainly parking) push you to a new venue. Our seating capacity is 150 - but our on site (off street) parking is less than 10 (realistically about eight cars only!!) and we have a very narrow street (residential area) which is being redeveloped with new townhouses soon so we will loose some of the street parking we currently have. We cannot expand or add parking on our land - it is very small (a third of an acre) and it is all covered already with the few parking spaces and the building. - advice, suggestions- THANKS!
The sanctuary is only one place to utlize this metric. I believe infant spaces, K-5/6 and 6/7 through high school areas also need to be measured. Good data makes for good decisions. Start now keeping statistics of these spaces, by day of week and by function (youth, adult, ?, etc.). By trending these, you will discover patterns of ‘High’ use before it becomes ‘Over’ use. It will also provide direction for planning where the growth can best fit the ministry.