What we're hearing
How do I hear from our people directly and repeatedly, watch a measure move across waves, and check no group is having a worse experience — without reading anyone's private answers?
Evaluations are longitudinal: you run the same question set as waves over time, so you can watch a measure move rather than reading a single snapshot. Two question sets are built in — a broader church health assessment and a short pulse — and the evaluation builder walks you through designing your own.
The builder follows the same order a researcher would: what you are trying to learn (the learning objective), who you should ask (the cohort), what the questions are actually measuring (constructs and measures), and only then the wording of the questions themselves.
- Learning objective
- The decision you want the evaluation to inform — evaluating a ministry, understanding belonging, checking volunteer health. It drives which measures are recommended.
- Cohort
- Who gets asked, resolved live from your Planning Center data: everyone, volunteers, former volunteers, parents of children's-ministry kids, small-group participants, new contacts, new members, leaders, or a ministry's participants. The builder shows how many people the cohort contains and how many are reachable by email.
- Construct
- The underlying idea being measured, such as belonging or parent partnership. Results group measures under their construct.
- Measure
- A small set of questions that together score one construct, with its scale and whether it is validated. Each measure gets a score out of 5 and a wave-over-wave change.
- Wave
- One run of an evaluation with its own open and close. Comparing waves is where the value is: run the same pulse each quarter.
- Invites
- Sent by email to Planning Center people who have an email address on their record. Invitations honour the evaluation's cohort and can be narrowed further to one campus.
- Shareable link
- Every wave also has a public link on your Disciplytics address you can put in a bulletin, text or slide for people you don't have emails for.
- Response rate
- Invites sent against responses received, per wave — read it before you read the results.
- Measure trend
- Every measure now charts its score across every wave of the evaluation, not just against the previous one. A wave that fell under the 5-response floor shows as a gap labelled "suppressed" — never as a zero.
- Compare by
- A selector above the measure sections that splits each measure score by group: cohort, campus, membership, gender, marital status, age band, households with children, distance from campus, tenure, attendance frequency, serving, giving and small-group participation. Each group shows its score and how many people answered.
- Equity check
- A panel at the top of the results that lists every measure and group sitting a meaningful distance below the church-wide average, ordered by the size of the gap, so no one has to work through every dimension by hand.
Results are aggregate-only. No one — not your staff, not Disciplytics — can open an individual submission from the app, and any measure, question or segment with fewer than 5 responses is suppressed rather than shown. Tell your congregation that plainly when you invite them; it is the reason the answers will be honest.
Answers can also feed the optional pooled discipleship research program, which an Admin turns on in Settings and each respondent chooses separately. See the Pooled research topic for what it involves and how it is protected.
That floor applies to the equity views too. Any demographic group with fewer than 5 responses is marked "too few responses" instead of being scored, which is what keeps small slices — a handful of single adults at one campus, for example — from becoming identifiable.
Read the results associationally. A measure moving alongside a change you made is a signal worth following up on with people, not proof that the change caused it. The same is true of an equity gap: it tells you where to go and ask, not why the gap exists.
- 1Open Listening → Ask a question and choose the closest goal: take a quick pulse, assess congregational health, evaluate a program or understand a group.
- 2For a pulse or congregational assessment, review the established question set, name it and choose how often it should repeat.
- 3For a program, name what you are evaluating and build a short Ministry Model: its purpose, its activities and the outcomes you hope to see. Then choose who should answer.
- 4Match library questions to those intended outcomes, or write a question unique to your church. The optional Question Coach can help clarify your wording before you add it.
- 5Read the review step's design warnings — length, duplicate constructs, too many open-ended questions — then deploy, which opens wave 1.
- 6Send invites to the cohort's synced email addresses, and share the public link for everyone else.
- 7Leave it open one to two weeks, then read results by construct and measure.
- 8Read the equity check first — it names the groups scoring below average — then set Compare by to the dimension it flagged to see the whole picture for that measure.
- 9Repeat the same evaluation next quarter and watch each measure's trend across waves.
Example
A pulse wave in January returns 61% agreement on "I know how to take my next step here"; the April wave returns 74% after you rewrote the connect card process. One campus stays at 58% — that is where to put attention, and it is visible without reading a single individual answer.
Example: reading an equity gap
The equity check flags "Belonging — households with children, 0.8 below average". Set Compare by to households with children: parents score 3.2 against 4.0 for everyone else, on 46 responses. Nothing there names a family; it tells you to sit down with a few parents and ask what Sunday morning is actually like for them.
Where to click: Listening → Results