Why every church should use ERA in Rock

Most people know ERA as the statistic that tracks how many runs a pitcher gives up on average in 9 innings. However, this is the second most impactful thing that ERA can measure. In your Rock instance, you’ll find that this acronym tracks something much more important.

eRA, or Estimated Regular Attendeer, is a person metric in Rock that helps estimate if someone is engaged with your church, using a combination of giving and attendance data. A person is marked as an eRA if they meet one of the following criteria:

1. Have given at least four times in 12 months, once being in the last six weeks
2. (or) have attended at least eight times in the last 16 weeks

While this isn’t a flawless way to measure engagement, most actively involved people will fall into one of these categories.

A person stops being an eRA if they meet all of the following conditions:

1. Haven't given in over eight weeks
2. (and) have attended less than eight times in the last 16 weeks
3. (and) haven't attended at all in the last four weeks

Again, this is not perfect logic, it is a strong indicator that someone has disengaged from the church.

Would it concern you if someone who has had regular activity in the past suddenly becomes irregular? Of course it would! You’d probably want to be notified or send them a communication, right? Well, we’ve thought of that for you. The Family Analytics job can be configured to launch a new workflow (you’ll still need to create the workflow) anytime a family enters or exits from being an eRA.

You may have noticed that some eRA calculations take up to 16 weeks to register a change. This delay is intentional. eRA is designed to be a stable metric that you can use for reporting and launching workflows. If people were constantly gaining and losing eRA status too quickly, analyzing trends would become much more difficult.

In a recent survey, we found that only about one-third of churches are using eRA. This makes sense as eRA’s recipe is unable to be modified. However, if your church isn’t using eRA, I would strongly urge you to reconsider. Even if enabling it conflicts with your current methods to track attendees, eRA can still provide additional insights. Every data point that we have on a person is another clue to help guide people on their spiritual journey. Why not throw together a report that finds the differences between your method of tracking people and eRA? You might find some interesting gaps or trends that could improve your approach.

I would encourage every church on Rock to consider using eRA. As we strive to make data-driven decisions to better care for people, we should take advantage of every tool in our utility belt. And if you’re really skeptical about eRA’s setup, why not enable it and check in on it every few months? Or have it as a talking point for discussions with other churches?

For more details on eRA, check out the Person & Family Field Guide. We’d love to hear how your church tracks engaged members! Share your insights by joining the Data Analytics Hub.