Every profile that is added to our 3.0 platform is eligible to be used in the live database that powers insights and reports on ChurchSalary.
Before profiles are used to power live salary reports, though, we need to answer three questions:
- Is the church real?
- Is the employee real?
- Does the employee cost the right amount of money?
To answer those three questions about all new and edited profiles on the platform, on a monthly basis, ChurchSalary built a powerful, new, behind-the-scenes feature called the Outlier Filter.
Step 1: Is the Church Real?
The discovery of the Cornerstone Model that structures the size and shape of every congregation—and which powers the Staff & Giving Analyzer—enables ChurchSalary to quickly discern whether a church looks “real” or not.
Because the Cornerstone Model is a literal mathematical formula—like gravity or the theory of relativity—that governs the relationship of several key metrics at every church, ChurchSalary is able to quickly determine with mathematical precision the odds that a church is real or not.
Step 2: Is the Employee Real?
The next step of the Outlier Filter passes all employee profiles through a second series of checks to verify their data is formatted correctly and this combination of criteria reflect a valid comparison point for church employees. For example, a part-time employee paid less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr would not pass the second series of checks.
Step 3: Does the Employee Cost the Right Amount of Money?
There is a universal pattern of how churches pay staff in terms of the cost of a given type of work relative to the church budget. Because ChurchSalary knows and understands this pattern and how it applies to all 18 of the position categories we track, the final step of the Outlier Filter seeks to answer the question, “Does this employee cost their church a similar amount of money as other churches?”
For example, a leader may miscategorize their full-blown Music Pastor as a Musician or their Youth Pastor as an Associate Pastor. Using several advanced statistical techniques, ChurchSalary can spot these miscategorizations and identify employees that don’t cost the church what we expect them to cost. They may be a valid, real employee but one of more criteria inside of their profile is off enough that we shouldn’t use them as a reference point for the reports generated by other churches.
Even after churches and employees pass these three steps, the Outlier Filter still allows ChurchSalary to manually quarantine profiles, if several other relationships between variables look off.
How Often?
At the beginning of every month, ChurchSalary processes new or edited profiles and adds only the best records to the live database.
Our current plan is to use the Outlier Filter to process monthly updates between January and August, incrementally working our way through the profiles added and edited by members during the busy Budget Season between September and December when over 60% of the ChurchSalary community logs in, edit profiles, and generate reports.
Our goal for this new Outlier Filter process is twofold:
- Provide members with stable but constantly updating salary reports,
- Catch up to real-time data as soon as possible.
As members and subscribers add and update their own profiles to generate reports and use the site, that same profile information can be used to power live reports, if it passes the series of checks built into the Outlier Filter.
Profiles that do not pass the series of checks built into the Outlier Filter, are still usable by the members who create and manage them. This process simply allows us to determine whether a profile is a good reference point that other churches should use to power their reports.
Click here, to learn more about how ChurchSalary gathers and shares information from different data sources.
