How we count, and what we publish

There is a number that appears in a great many Christian annual reports, and it is almost always wrong. It is the number of people who were "saved" or "reached" or "gave their lives" in a given period. It is wrong not because anyone is lying, but because of what has to happen for it to be produced.

Somebody clicked something. Somebody raised a hand at the end of a meeting. Somebody filled in a card. Each of those is a real event. None of them is the thing the number claims to describe.

What the number is actually measuring

A click measures a click. It tells you a person, at a particular moment, was moved enough to act — which is genuinely meaningful, and worth knowing. What it cannot tell you is whether anything continued after the browser closed.

The gap between those two things is not small. Anyone who has done follow-up work knows that a substantial proportion of people who respond cannot be reached afterwards, do not respond to contact, or turn out to have been responding to something other than what the organisation thought. This is not cynicism. It is the ordinary experience of everyone who has tried to follow up honestly.

The problem is that the gap is invisible in the reported figure. A ministry that follows up nobody and a ministry that follows up everyone can publish the same headline number.

Why it matters beyond accuracy

If it were only an accuracy problem it would still be worth fixing. But over-counting does two further kinds of damage.

It distorts what an organisation optimises for. A number that goes up when people click, and does not move when people are cared for, will eventually shape the design of everything upstream of it. The pressure is subtle. Nobody decides to manipulate anyone. But the countdown appears, the copy tightens, the option to leave gets smaller, and the response rate improves. Each individual change is defensible. The direction is not.

It makes the organisation harder to trust on everything else. A donor or a partner who works out that the conversion figure is soft has no way of knowing which other figures are soft. Credibility is not divisible.

What we will publish

We are committing to report four separate numbers where most organisations report one.

Reach. Unique people exposed to our content. This is a measure of exposure and nothing more. It is not people reached with the Gospel in the sense of people who engaged with it, and we will not describe it that way.

Responses, by type. People who actively chose one of four distinct options: wanting to know more, asking a question, requesting prayer, or saying they had decided to follow Jesus. Reported separately, never combined into one total. Each is recorded as self-reported, with its date.

Followed-up responses. The number of those where human contact was actually completed according to our protocol. This is the number that costs something to improve, because it can only be improved by having enough trained people.

The gap. The difference between the second and third figures, stated plainly. If we promise a response within twenty-four hours and achieve it for sixty per cent of people, the honest thing is to publish sixty per cent, not to publish the promise.

What this means for the site itself

Reporting discipline is worth very little if the pages upstream of it are designed to inflate the input. So the same commitment shows up in how the Gospel section is built.

Nothing is preselected. There is no countdown and no scarcity language. Reading, watching and listening cost nothing and require no details. The four response options are presented as four genuinely different things rather than as four steps towards the same one. And our experimentation rules explicitly forbid running tests on Gospel response, giving or pastoral need — a conversion-rate experiment run on someone deciding what to do about God is not a design practice, it is a category error.

The objection

The obvious objection is that this makes the organisation look smaller. It does. A report that says "eleven thousand people read this, four hundred and twelve responded, two hundred and eighty were followed up, and here is why the last number is lower than the one before it" is less impressive than one that says eleven thousand people were reached.

It is also the only version of the report that a reasonable person can act on. And it is the only version that, in five years, we will not have to quietly stop publishing.

What a click never was

None of this is a claim about who is or is not a Christian. That is not a question a website can answer, and it is not one we are trying to answer with a metric. The point is narrower: the moment somebody presses a button on a page is a moment we should be glad about and careful with, and it is not a fact about that person's eternal state that we are entitled to put in a chart.

So we will count what we can actually see — that someone chose something, that someone spoke to them, that someone kept the promise we made about how fast we would reply — and we will leave the rest alone.