Our Work With Laura Howe: Maintaining A Culture of Care for Churches and Communities Without Burnout

Places of worship should also be places of hope and sustainable care, but that goal is becoming more difficult to reach as mental health issues and burnout among ministry leaders continue to rise. Through her proprietary Caring Church Review and Response (Recognize, Restore, Resource, Reach), Laura Howe works with leaders to develop a culture of caring; to expand their impact; and to prevent burnout among staff, volunteers, and the congregation.

But without the right systems and data, Laura was becoming a target for stress, too!

Here’s how we worked together on her Caring Church Review Dashboard and some of the outcomes she discovered along the way.

A Note from Kelsy

Here’s the thing about data: there’s so much possibility in data and numbers, if you know how to gather and read the information. If there’s a way to extract the data points from the system, chances are we can do almost anything with it; you just have to have the idea and we can build a valuable tool.

What if data could help you work more efficiently with clients? You’d be able to make more of an impact, faster. And that also means you’d be able to work with more clients and make more profit. Who doesn’t want that?

That’s what we accomplished with Laura!

About Hope Made Strong

Laura helps ministry leaders to care for their churches and their communities without burning out, and she does that in various ways. She offers consulting—customized support where she works with churches to help them build and develop care ministries that strengthen their church without depleting their ministry leaders. She also offers self-guided courses that both support the caregiver and builds their skills. Laura also hosts a podcast that offers practical resources and tools to help churches care for their congregants without burning out.

Laura’s Caring Church Review is a three-point approach to assessing the strengths and needs of 1) church staff, 2) congregants, and 3) community. Her clients (the churches) receive a personalized plan and dashboard view of how they can take steps to flourish and grow.

You can learn more about Hope Made Strong here.

Hope Made Strong’s Challenges

Laura wanted to create an easily repeatable process that she could walk clients through. She had a tool that could collect the data well but was unable to fully customize it. In addition, it didn’t allow her the breadth of assessment or analysis of the data. For example, the software didn’t allow her to combine the results of more than one church or split the results into demographics (or throw out the bad surveys that were skewing results!). Her biggest challenge was that she wanted to create a streamlined, repeatable system that she could walk clients through using their unique data and present it in a way that allowed her the flexibility to customize by client.

This was an exciting challenge because often business owners over-complicate data tools. I wanted to show Laura that she didn’t need a fancy system or process; you don’t have to be a coder to create robust reports. The software that Laura was using to collect the data was free, which isn’t a bad thing, but typically free software is limited in the reports you can create. We were able to put my proprietary Metrics Pro Method™ to get Laura only what she needed, which I’ll explain more below.

Before (Scores were limited to these individual tiles only)

After (Now we can customize whatever goes into this graph and see relationships)

What Laura Already Tried

This was a new process and dashboard for Laura, so she hadn’t tried creating her own solution just yet. She also had a vision of how this could be streamlined and customized by client. She had been thinking about it for a while, but didn’t feel like she had the skills to create what she needed on her own. Rather than allowing the thinking to hold her back, she took action and scheduled a KPI Strategy Audit with us.

What Hadn’t Worked Before

Again, since this was new to Laura, she didn’t want to sit and think for too long. And since clients were already booking her for consulting, she didn’t have time for failed attempts at a solution. What wasn’t working for her was that the data she needed felt stuck inside of the tool. She mainly had raw data to work with, and the reports weren’t customizable by client. In the end, she was limited in her ability to grow with clients with the existing tool.

Why Laura Reached Out

Laura heard me speak to our mastermind, and when I showed examples of some dashboards, she said she instantly knew that I had the skill set to create what she didn't think was possible before. This was her first realization that there was a tool out there that didn’t require customized code or engineers. In the demonstration she saw, Laura realized she had a lot more opportunity with customization than she ever thought was possible.

What Laura Wanted to Accomplish

Laura wanted something customizable. She wanted it to be useful across platforms, and she wanted it to be able to scale in her business. And she wanted it to be streamlined. She was looking for something that she could replicate over and over and over, even with limited tech skills.

What We Accomplished Together

With the data and reporting in mind that Laura needed, I was able to create a templated dashboard that provided the right reports with the right visuals. We still use her legacy software for what it’s great at (collecting the data), and on top of that, created a dynamic Google Sheets dashboard tool that could translate the data, analytics, and visuals. The dashboard allows for custom data reporting for clients in a way that’s easy to access—with all the nerdy data stuff hidden behind the scenes because she didn’t need to see it.

After (Custom burnout measurement graphs—see total burnout and exactly how it breaks down, so we can target the biggest issue - lack of energy)

The Results, in Laura’s Words

“Kelsy took what are the best pieces of that tool and translated it into exactly what I needed. What I see meets my needs exactly because it doesn't overwhelm me. It's very simple for me, without me having to look at all that data and all of the math that’s very overwhelming to me. She was able to create something that I was able to use and that is palatable where clients and I can consume the data and translate it into information that we can put into an action plan in our consulting work.

We were able to be ahead of schedule with a high-quality reporting dashboard so I can build out roadmaps and action plans and see growth in the churches and in the organizations that I consult with.”

New Possibilities in Laura’s Business

Working together and creating these dashboards has opened up Laura’s eyes to see how much analytics and how much data she actually had—which helps her better support her clients. Within the original tool, it was rigid, where this number goes with that category (in a silo). But with the customization and exporting the data outside of that software and putting it into a dashboard, she now has the ability to cross-reference data points that weren’t possible before. This means more actionable data and being able to serve her clients more effectively and efficiently. She can now serve more clients than she was able to before and offer a deeper level of service. This means she can earn more income, with less time in front of her computer!

About Laura Howe

Laura loves to equip ministry leaders to care for their churches & communities without burning out.

Founder of Hope Made Strong and the Church Mental Health Summit, Laura is a mental health clinician and a community development strategist for churches that want to transform their community with care ministries.

She specializes in supporting local church leaders to overcome and prevent burnout, creating effective and sustainable care ministries, and helping churches grow their community impact and influence.

When ministry leaders are healthy and when churches have a culture of care, communities are transformed. Connect with her on LinkedIn.