Edit facilitator form

If this is your first NCD Survey, and you have a multiple congregation church, there are some points you should consider before starting your survey. Please read more about multiple congregation considerations.

To get started with your NCD Survey, please enter the following details.

Church survey language

1. Church name *

Be sure to enter your church name descriptively, particularly if you are surveying a specific congregation within your church or parish (e.g. Life Community Church 10am, St Mark’s Anglican 6pm, etc.). If you are doing a general survey of your church, just enter the name by which it is best known.

For greater convenience, would you like to invite some or all of your survey participants to complete their survey directly online?

Online participants

Selection criteria

To ensure you get the most accurate NCD Survey results possible, you must select your survey participants on the basis of the following four criteria.

Each individual participant must regularly attend the worship service, AND
Must have some form of regular task in the church (no matter what it is), AND
Must be part of some form of small group in the church (any subgroup of the worshipping community)
In addition to fulfilling the above three criteria, the collective survey group should be representative of the church as a whole (i.e. it should include non-leaders as well as leaders, a proportionate number of people from different age groups and genders, etc.)

We suggest you start writing down a list of people so that you can check they fulfil the criteria and that no one who should be part of the group misses out. Don’t forget to include the pastor who should also complete a participant survey. You will be able to add participants to your survey up until the time you calculate your result.

Sample size

Your participant group should be all the people you have who fulfil the above criteria up to a MAXIMUM of 30 people including the senior pastor.

So, if you have less than 30 people who fulfil the criteria, you will get an accurate result by surveying all of the people who do fulfil it
If you have more than 30 people who fulfil the criteria, you are free to survey as many of those people as you like, however the result will not increase significantly in accuracy beyond 30 people. Having said that, if your people are sometimes slow to respond to requests from the church leadership, we recommend you add some extra survey participants to make sure you have enough responses by the time you would like to finalize your survey.

Above all, it is most important that those who complete the survey fulfil the above selection criteria.

If the selection criteria or sample size raises questions or challenges for you, or you are a very small or very large church, this further information may be helpful.

Survey participants

Begin entering below the name and email address of any of your survey participants who will find it most convenient to complete the survey online (via a computer, mobile device, etc.). They will receive a unique link back to this web site where they can complete their survey. They will NOT need to log in or create an account on the site and will have no access to your account.

You can view and click through a sample participant survey here.

Even for those participants who do not have online access, it may be easier for you when facilitating the survey to send them an online invitation to the church office email address or to an email address of one of their friends or family and then invite them to complete the survey at that location. Just be sure they are given some instructions and privacy when entering their responses.

If it would be easier to have some or all of your participants complete the survey on paper and return it to you for entering, instructions for doing so will be available after you have completed and saved this page.

If multiple participants share an email address (e.g. a husband and wife, etc.), enter each person separately with that common email address next to each one of them, so they will be able to complete their own set of responses.

Participant full name

Contact email address

Don't send participant invitations at this stage? Tick this option to save your participant details but not send their invitations. You will be able to come back and edit your list and send their invitations when you are ready.

Church and Pastor details

In addition to receiving your participant responses, the following information needs to be entered before you can complete your survey. If someone other than yourself needs to provide this information, you can either get them to complete it directly on screen, or download and give them a paper copy of the form from which you can then enter the information. Download church details pdf

2. Church Address

a. Address 1

b. Address 2

c. City

d. State or Province

e. Post/zip code

f. Country

3. Church web site

Contact

9. Contact name (if different from pastor, e.g. survey administrator, otherwise optional)

10. Contact address

a. Address 1

b. Address 2

c. City

d. State or Province

e. Post/zip code

f. Country

11. Contact phone number

12. Contact fax number

13. Contact cell phone number

14. Contact email address

Survey criteria

The NCD Survey measures the health of the core of your church since our research clearly shows that the health of the core most influences the church as a whole and its wider community. In order to provide as objective a measurement as possible, it is important to then measure the core of your church against the similarly defined core of other churches in the NCD database. To do this, a criteria that is relevant for the widest range of biblical church expressions must be used. For this reason, NCD applies the ministry task, worship and small group attending criteria.

Smaller churches

If your church does not have 30 people who fulfil the survey criteria, you will still get an accurate result by surveying all the people who do fulfil the criteria since they are a 100% sample of the core of your church. It is the best possible sample.

Larger churches

If your church has many more than 30 people who fulfil the survey criteria, there is no need to survey more than 30 as the accuracy of your result will not increase as long as those people fulfil the criteria and are representative of the overall church demographics. As with any survey, significantly biasing the NCD Survey sample in any particular way will of course change the results. For example, surveying a disproportionately large number of people in a particular age, gender, or ethnic group or having many more leaders in the sample as opposed to people who have a ministry task but are perhaps not leaders, can bias your results. The survey does measure the core of your church, however the core according to the criteria may be wider than you realise.

Therefore in selecting your 30 people, pay particular attention to making sure you first look at the full spectrum of the kind of people who fulfil the survey criteria in your church, then select survey participants in such a way as to get a representative sample of your whole church. If, having considered such a list, the survey would be easier to facilitate by including more than 30 people, by all means do so, but be sure they all fulfil the criteria and are collectively representative of your whole church.

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