Online Church Attendance

Church Attendance Data Tracking & Reporting 
In 2023, at the 136th Annual Convention of the Episcopal Church in Colorado, a resolution was passed requiring churches to track and report individuals worshipping online. Within months after the resolution, the General Convention Office released a new web-based application designed to assist in compiling data for the annual parochial report of The Episcopal Church. This app allows users to track details of all liturgies in their congregation. Our resolution, meant to fill the need to track and report online attendance in the absence of a church-wide tool to do so, no longer applies internally to our diocese via the online tools that we developed to do this work as the need has been met by The Episcopal Church parochial report. Reporting via the church-wide parochial reporting process will bring us in line with churches and dioceses across the wider Episcopal Church. Tracking & Reporting is for Sunday worship and major feast days in total, annually.

Counting Online Viewers for Church Services

Counting viewers for online church services on various platforms is crucial for understanding the reach and engagement of your services. Here are step-by-step instructions for common platforms:

To see insights for your Page’s videos:
  1. Log into Facebook, then click your profile photo in the top right.
  2. Click See all profiles, then select the Page you want to switch into.
  3. Click Meta Business Suite in the left menu.
  4. Click Insights in the left menu.
  5. In the left menu under Video, click on Performance, and then click on 1-Minute Video Views in the tabs.
  6. Make sure you’ve selected your entire year in the settings, and not just Top Videos for accurate reporting.

  1. Go to YouTube Studio.
  2. Go to Analytics for your videos.
  3. In the top right corner, adjust the date to the last calendar year.
  4. YouTube counts a video view after 30 seconds of watch time. You do not need to find +1 minutes views; just use the number that YouTube supplies as a view.
  5. Use your total views for the last year.
  6. If you also post videos other than worship, you will need to manually calculate views by looking through your videos and only counting worship service views.

  1. Open the analytics panel
  2. Overview of the analytics panel
  3. Understand your view rate
  4. Viewer retention stats

  1. To find your last month’s viewership, sign in to the Zoom web portal.
  2. In the navigation menu, do one of the following:
    • If you are an account owner, admin, or have a role with access to Usage Reports, click Account Management then Reports.
  3. Click the type of report that you would like to pull. You can also click the User Activity Reports tab to view additional types of reports (only accessible to the account owner by default).
  4. Add the number of participants per meeting together to find total viewership for the month.
  5. Zoom only provides reporting for 1 month at a time. You will need to manually add each month’s total viewers.

Tips for Increasing Viewership:

  • Promote Your Services: Advertise live streams in advance across social media, email, and your website.
  • Engage with Your Audience: Foster interaction during the live stream through comments and questions.
  • Optimize for Search: Use relevant keywords in titles and descriptions for better discoverability.
  • Regular Schedule: Stick to a consistent streaming schedule to build a regular audience.

By leveraging these steps and tools, your church can effectively monitor and enhance its online viewership. If you have any questions about reporting, or have found the instructions to finding your data difficult to navigate, please contact Canon Mike Orr at Mike@EpiscopalColorado.org for support.