WWD3
Attendance at Religious Services
Community
What we do
Attendance at Religious Services
Religious institutions, spaces, activities, and beliefs play a huge part in our societal dynamics across the globe. In the UK, the last census, 2021, showed 46.2% of people in England and Wales reported their religion as ‘Christian’, 6.5% reported themselves as ‘Muslim’, 1.7% reported being ‘Hindu’, 0.9% as Sikh, and 0.5% as Buddhist and Jewish respectively. There are also another 0.6% who report ‘other religion’. Whilst the religion question of the census is voluntary, and there are differing surveys that show variations of these percentages of the population, even at the most conservative end of the scale there are still a huge number of people who believe in and participate in religious activities regularly in the UK.
In terms of actual religious spaces, there are around 40,000 church buildings in the UK open to the public and being used for worship and other community based activities. There are thousands of religious spaces dedicated to the other religions in the UK (e.g. over 1,500 mosques, approx 500 synagogues, and 500 Hindu temples, and approx 200 Buddhist buildings).
The communities that work, worship and volunteer in these spaces run a wide variety of activities and services that have a huge collective impact on our UK society. On top of regular religious services, centres may run homeless services, food banks, drug and alcohol programmes, nighttime economy support, youth activities, environmental and ecology programmes, support for the elderly and adult social care, child and family support, or other activities based on community need.
The potential for direct and indirect economic value,, and wellbeing value creation, for the communities that engage with these institutions is huge. There are existing values relating to religious activities as well as rich data sets on religious engagement, and validated (tried and tested) ways to most accurately ask about these. For this Measure Up value we are focusing on the wellbeing value of attendance at religious services. There are however many other areas of potential value creation that we may explore more in the future.
Key Value
A monetised social value of £3,400
This is the monetised wellbeing value of 1 person attending religious services ‘once a week or more’
The values are guided by government policy (The Green Book) and economics based research into the relationship between religious activity and wellbeing (measured by life satisfaction.) The Green Book recommends that life satisfaction is expressed as £ monetised wellbeing, using the value of £13,000 for 1 WELLBY, over one year.
Research has been done by State of Life which found that even after accounting for other factors, compared to someone who ‘never or almost never’ attends religious services, someone who attends ‘once a week or more’ is associated with an increase in life satisfaction of 0.22333. Therefore this change in attending religious services is worth 0.22333 WELLBYs, or 0.22333*£13,000 = £2,903 (rounded to £3,000).
Adjusted value for inflation to 2023 prices is £3,407. Our approach to inflation adjustments is explained on our Methodology page HERE
A rounded value of £3,400 in 2023 prices.
A similar figure is reported in the House of Good 2021 report update which states a range of wellbeing value for a person attending religious services weekly of between £2,417 – £3,867, and a central value of £3,142.
Bronze
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Monetised social value: Multiply the proportion of your stakeholder group you expect to regularly attend religious services by £3,400
APPLYING THE WELLBY VALUE: Consider the proportion of your stakeholder group that you expect to regularly attend religious services. Multiply this by £3,000 to obtain a value per person.
If you can’t ask people directly about their attendance at religious services, because you’re unable to survey them, or this is a plan for a future project, then you can use this value as an estimation for the increased attendance. It is an estimate of the impact of an intervention that is effective at changing someone from never or almost never attending, to attending at least once a week.
At the bronze level (where you are assuming what the impact might be) your value is likely to overestimate the value of your intervention. Realistically moving from not attending at all to attending services weekly could be a big shift for a person. Therefore it is important to be conservative in your approach to estimating your potential impact.
Example
You invest in an engagement programme for your local religious space with the aim that more people begin to attend regularly. You know that you currently have approximately 20 people attending services weekly. You estimate that the programme of engagement could double this amount over the next year.
Increase in attendance from 20 people to 40 people each week. 20x £3400 for full year = £68,000
Silver
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Monetised social value: Consider whether the religious centre is rural or urban, and adjust the value based on this.
Consider adjusting the wellbeing value estimate based on whether the religious centre is urban or rural.
There is a higher wellbeing value shown in the House of Good research for those attending in suburban or urban areas rather than rural areas.
In these cases the value could be adjusted:
- Rural – £2600 per person (rounded from £2622 reported in House of Good 2021 report). Inflation adjusted value to 2023 prices is £3077 rounded to £3100
- Suburban or Urban – £3300 (rounded from £3272 reported in House of Good 2021 report). Inflation adjusted value to 2023 prices is £3840 rounded to £3800
Gold
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Monetised social value: Measure actual attendance at religious services, and measure actual amounts of difference that religious belief makes to people’s lives
At Gold level you are looking to build on your silver estimations by engaging with the person or people affected.
Therefore, at the Gold level, you should survey users about their actual levels of wellbeing rather than using the proxy value.
There are many options for surveying people on their wellbeing.
A good starting point for questions to ask directly through primary research with your stakeholders is the Maximise Your Impact Guide. This guide covers 10 overall impact questions. For Gold level practice you would be looking to understand the question ‘what changes do people experience?’ and ‘how much of each change happened’. Questions you might want to include in your survey to uncover the outcomes they experience could include:
- What changed for you (or happened to you) as a result of our activity or programme?
- Were there any other changes?
- Did these changes lead on to anything else?
- Were the changes all positive?
- Were any of them unexpected?
- What did you want to happen?
- How did your situation/ circumstances affect your experience?
A starting point for questions related to wellbeing is to look at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing website: https://whatworkswellbeing.org/about-wellbeing/how-to-measure-wellbeing/ .
As you start to measure wellbeing directly from the people affected, one set of questions it is important to consider is the ONS4 – the national measures for subjective wellbeing in the UK which asks the following 4 questions on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘not at all’ and 10 is ‘completely’:
- Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
- Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things that you do in your life are worthwhile?
- Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
- On a scale where 0 is ‘not at all anxious’ and 10 is ‘completely anxious’, how anxious did you feel yesterday overall?
For this specific value, you should also include a question about how religious belief affects the person, eg.
How much difference would you say religious beliefs make to your life? Would you say they make…
- A great difference
- Some difference
- A little difference
- Or no difference?
You will also need to understand how often the person attends a religious service, meeting, or group. So ask:
How often, if at all, do you attend religious services or meetings?
- Once a week or more
- Less often but at least once a month
- Less often but at least once a year
- Never or practically never
- Only at weddings, funerals etc
These questions are aligned to the methodology in the House of Good 2020 report.
You could also consider other data gathering activities, including direct observation, or focus groups.
Support in developing your Gold survey approach is available through the Measure Up partners, so please do reach out to Impact, State of Life or PRD.
Gold+
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Monetised social value: Adjust your measurement based on comparison to your control group, and discounting any other causality factors that may have had an impact on their overall wellbeing
At the Gold+ level, you are building on your Gold value calculation by assessing the value against the counterfactual, or ‘what would have happened anyway’.
To do this you should identify a control group suitable to assess in line with your intervention, in order to more accurately attribute any changes to your intervention.
You could also consider any other discount or causality elements linked to your job creation activity.
Support in developing your Gold+ counterfactual, causality and discount approach is available through the Measure Up partners, so please do reach out to Impact, State of Life or PRD.
| Value Type: | Activity |
What's this?
This is the type of value. Some values are outcomes, which means many different interventions might lead to them, others are specific interventions that have a set value. |
|---|---|---|
| UN SDG Categories: |
|
What's this?
The UN Sustainable Development Goals are global goals adopted in 2015 for all signed up nations to achieve for us to have a sustainable global future by 2030. There are 17 Goals that address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The Goals are all interconnected, and in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030. |
| PN06/20 Categories: |
|
What's this?
PPN 06/20 Taking account of social value in the award of central government contracts introduced the Central Government Social Value Model in 2020 which all Central Government contracting authorities must use in their in scope procurements. It consists of 5 themes, 8 policy outcomes, and 24 Model Award Criteria which outline key priority areas to achieve more social value. |
Evidence
Measure Up focuses on empowering you to numerically measure the impact you’re having. We recommend that numeric reports are backed up with stories and other types of evidence to help illustrate, in human terms, the impact that’s being made on individuals.
We recommend seeking consent from one or more participants in your intervention to collect and tell their story. This should include a little background on the participant, a summing up of life before the intervention, the human impact of the intervention, and the longer term (if known) impact on the person’s life outside of, and after, the intervention.
Providing photographs, audio recordings, video interviews or even artifacts from the intervention (for example, writing, paintings, music, etc from creative interventions) can add more colour, and convey the emotional impact of interventions more directly.
In some cases it’s appropriate to anonymise or abbreviate the personal information of case study participants. No story should be published or shared without the recorded consent of the individual(s) it concerns. Individuals continue to own the rights to their stories and if they request you stop sharing the story or making it available online you should do so promptly and without need for justification.
Feedback
Measure Up is an open, collaborative and transparent. If you have any suggestions or feedback on our pragmatic, recommended approach to measuring Life Satisfaction please get in touch so we can share and discuss this at our next Advisory Group meeting.
More help
We want to empower anyone to perform and improve their impact measurement – without needing a degree in economics.
If you need any more help, or just someone to do the legwork for you we can help signpost you to software, training and consultancy to help you get to grips with the impact you’re having.
