Understanding Data used for Marketing
Understanding Data
Churches use data to run online advertising campaigns, understand who visited your church last Sunday, measure changes in yearly giving and many many other very important goals. Data helps us understand the current situation and create meaningful plans.
To start, let's define the types of data churches typically have (whether you realize it or not):
First party data is the data that you produce yourself.
Example—members lists, attendance lists, weekly childcare check-ins, giving reports, etc.
Second party data is obtained from ministry partners who share their first party data with you.
Example—lists of people who contribute to local faith-based charities.
Third party data is purchased from an outside vendor.
Example—new mover list, demographics list, etc.
ConnectFirst utilizes first party and third party data. Our third party data aggregates addresses when there is an indication of a new resident in the home, while our first party data comes from your own church website traffic.
Data Accuracy
All data (even first party) has an error rate. For example—how accurate is your church member list? It likely depends on how often you update it and how many members are at your church to begin with. Large churches have notoriously out of date member roles.
For marketing and communications purposes, typically, first party data is the most relevant and most accurate, but accuracy can vary church to church. Third party data is typically collected from the most diverse sources which provides insights into audiences you couldn't otherwise access but it can increase the error rate.
No matter the source, all data degrades over time and sometimes quite quickly. Even the best data needs to be utilized as quickly as possible after it is collected.
ConnectFirst's third party new mover data has been measured to be 93.5% accurate. This means that we expect 6 to 7 postcards out of every 100 to not reach a new resident.
We have put many processes in place to make our data as accurate as possible. But, if we know that some of our marketing effort will miss the target, does that mean that it is not worthwhile? Not at all. Would you rather 93.5% of your budget welcome and invite new neighbors or not welcome any at all? The opportunity out weighs the waste by a large margin.
This is a question to ask in all marketing efforts. People are often surprised to know that traditional digital advertising has an accuracy rate of only 60%. A shocking 40% of your budget is wasted on bots.
