The Report That Tells You What Your Community Asked For
A church can always tell you what it spent. Ask what the community asked for that the church could not provide, and the room goes quiet.
Not because nobody was paying attention. Because that number has never existed anywhere. It is made of conversations that ended with “I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone who does that,” and those conversations leave no trace.
What a gap actually is
Two different things, and they need different responses.
Nobody does this here. Forty-one people asked about dental care. Your county has no free or sliding-scale dental provider. No amount of better referring fixes this. It is a ministry question, and it is the kind of thing a church partnership or a grant application is actually for.
Someone does this, and they are full. The rent assistance fund exists, and it runs out in the second week of every month. This is a capacity gap, and the response is different: it is a conversation with that agency, or a decision about where your own benevolence fund goes.
A report that cannot tell these apart is not much use. CMinLink’s outcome report carries a capacity signal per organization alongside the per-category tables, precisely because the response differs.
What is in the report
- Created and closed counts, over a date range you choose.
- Connection rate — the share of referrals that ended with someone actually being served.
- Median days to close — how long it took.
- Outcome and reason breakdowns — served, partially served, not served, and why, using your church’s own reason vocabulary rather than ours.
- Per-category and per-organization tables, each with a not-served rate, plus the capacity-gap signal.
- Source breakdown — where the request came from, so a church can see what its own website is bringing in versus the front desk and the phone.
Referrals that predate outcome tracking are counted once and excluded from every denominator. A rate computed against records that were never going to have an outcome is a flattering lie, and this is where that lie usually enters.
The report is printable, which matters more than it should. A number that cannot be put in front of a board meeting does not affect a decision.
What you can do with it that you could not before
Argue for the budget with evidence. “Utility assistance requests doubled between November and January, and we turned away nine” is a different conversation from “we should probably budget more.”
Stop sending people somewhere that does not work. A provider with a high not-served rate is visible. On a printed list, the tenth person gets sent anyway.
Bring a real number to a partner. Walking into a county meeting with “forty-one people asked us for dental care last year” is a different kind of contribution than an opinion.
Say no to the right things. A church cannot meet every need. Knowing which needs are actually arriving lets leadership choose deliberately instead of by whoever asked most recently.
The uncomfortable part
The report is only as honest as the outcomes recorded in it, and the valuable rows are the unwelcome ones. The number was disconnected. The waitlist was ten weeks. Nobody called back.
A church that only records the successes will produce a beautiful report that says nothing. The first time this report is run it usually reads worse than people expected, and that is the version worth trusting.
Related
Common questions
- How long does it take before this report says anything?
- A quarter is enough to see the shape. The gaps get interesting at about a year, once seasonal needs have been through a cycle.
- What if most of our referrals have no recorded outcome?
- Then the report tells you that, which is itself useful. Referrals that predate outcome tracking are counted once and excluded from every rate, so they do not quietly flatter the numbers.
- Can we share this outside the church?
- Anonymized totals can be exported for a ministerial association, a regional initiative, or a grant application.