- Starting price
- Free for up to 50 responses
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web survey · Leadership dashboard · CSV export
- Developer
- Made to Flourish
- Launched
- 2024
- Updated
- Aug 16, 2026
The verdict
Scatter asks a better church-database question than “who attended?”: what work, skills, callings, relationships, and community concerns already fill people’s lives? Its standardized survey and live dashboard can expose ministry opportunities without forcing a staff team to design an instrument. The central risk is equally clear. Answers about occupation, satisfaction, purpose, faith at work, church support, skills, and causes can become identifiable pastoral profiles; the privacy policy and FAQ give Made to Flourish broad use rights and let the requesting church receive aggregate and individual responses. Use transparent invitations, genuine optionality, minimum access, small-group suppression, a deletion plan, and a promise that responses will never affect care, membership, employment, or standing.
Try Scatter ↗Opens madetoflourish.org
Scatter is a Made to Flourish research tool for churches that want to understand congregants beyond Sunday participation. Its roughly twenty-five questions cover occupation and industry, work setting and location, satisfaction and purpose, whether a workplace feels faith-friendly, spiritual practices, faith-work integration, recent church teaching, peer connection, skills, community activity, and causes or populations a respondent cares about.
After members complete the five-to-seven-minute survey, authorized leaders can inspect a live catalog and dashboard, filter results, view individual responses, and look for patterns that could shape preaching, discipleship, small groups, volunteer invitations, workplace support, and local partnerships. The questions are fixed rather than locally customizable so results retain a consistent framework.
The first fifty responses are free. Annual plans are listed by weekly attendance: $99 for churches of 1–200, $299 for 201–400, $699 for 401–1,000, and $999 above 1,000, with custom arrangements for multi-campus churches. A free survey can continue collecting after fifty responses, but results beyond the limit remain locked until an upgrade.
We reviewed current overview, application, pricing and FAQ material, privacy and terms, and the faith.tools listing without administering a congregation-wide survey, verifying the vendor’s claimed thirty-to-forty-percent response rate, auditing access logs, or inspecting private contracts. The product is intended for adults eighteen and older. Churches should present the actual data flow before asking anyone to participate.
✓ The good
- Whole-life ministry lens - work, skills, vocation, faith, and neighborhood contribution receive attention beyond attendance
- Short standardized instrument - churches avoid designing and validating a long custom survey from scratch
- Immediate dashboard - leaders can filter themes and move from assumptions toward evidence
- Accessible entry point - fifty responses can be collected and reviewed without payment
- Clear annual tiers - published pricing scales by weekly attendance rather than individual user seats
- Practical discovery - answers can reveal mentors, occupations, abilities, causes, and unmet support needs
- CSV workflow - exported names and emails can be joined carefully with existing systems when consent permits
✗ Watch out
- Sensitive individual profiles - combined vocation, belief, satisfaction, location, skills, and cause data can expose more than respondents expect
- Broad vendor rights - the privacy policy permits extensive collection, use, and disclosure subject to law
- Dual ownership claim - official guidance says both the church administrator and Scatter own survey data
- Individual access - the requesting church may receive identifiable responses, not only anonymous trends
- Small-group reidentification - filters can reveal people even when a chart omits names
- Fixed questionnaire - churches cannot remove questions that are culturally unsuitable or unnecessary
- No direct ChMS integration - CSV merging adds governance, duplication, and access-control work
Best for
- Churches building vocation, workplace discipleship, mentoring, service, or community-impact ministries
- Leaders willing to explain every data use and make participation genuinely optional
- Teams with a named data steward, restricted administrator access, and a deletion schedule
- Congregations that will report aggregate learning back to members and act on it constructively
Avoid if
- Leaders intend to evaluate spirituality, loyalty, employability, giving, membership, or pastoral standing from answers
- Members cannot decline without pressure or do not know staff can view individual responses
- The church lacks rules for administrators, exports, small cohorts, retention, deletion, and breach response
- A customizable, anonymous, youth-inclusive, multilingual, or clinically validated instrument is required
What Scatter is
Scatter is a ministry-discovery survey and insight dashboard. It is not a spiritual assessment, employee evaluation, psychological instrument, census, background check, pastoral-care record, or proof of a person’s calling, maturity, satisfaction, or commitment.
The most useful unit is often a congregation-level pattern, yet the platform can expose individual answers. A filter for occupation, location, cause, or dissatisfaction can identify someone in a small church even without a visible name, so “aggregate” does not automatically mean anonymous.
Why work-and-calling data can change ministry—and trust
Most church systems organize people around services, groups, giving, and volunteer roles. Scatter starts with the work and contribution people already perform across homes, workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, helping leaders recognize Monday-through-Saturday ministry.
That perspective creates unusual intimacy. A church earns the insight only by limiting collection and power: explain who will read responses, why each question matters, how long records remain, how members can withdraw, and which decisions will never use the data.
Standardized adult survey: broad signal without custom design
The instrument collects structured answers about work, purpose, faith integration, church support, relationships, expertise, and community concern in one relatively short session.
Preview the entire survey with a representative member group. Tell respondents that church administrators may see individual answers, allow unanswered items where possible, and do not imply that completion is a spiritual obligation.
Dashboard and filters: patterns that can become profiles
Leaders can browse a catalog, filter results, review real-time insights, and inspect individual submissions to locate shared needs or potential connections.
Grant access to the fewest trained people, log exports, suppress tiny cohorts, avoid curiosity searches, and publish only groups large enough to prevent reidentification. Never use private answers as sermon anecdotes without fresh consent.
CSV export and ministry action: value begins after the chart
Exported names and emails can support invitation and careful reconciliation with a church database, while the vendor provides resources and suggested next steps.
Ask permission again before matching records or contacting someone about a sensitive answer. Share what the church learned, what it will change, what it will not do, and when the underlying export will be deleted.
Pricing
Free
$0
Review up to fifty responses. Additional submissions may continue, but data above the limit remains locked until upgrade.
Churches with 1–200 weekly attendees
$99/year
Annual access to survey responses, dashboard insights, resources, and exports for the smallest tier.
Churches with 201–400 weekly attendees
$299/year
The same core platform at the next attendance band.
Churches with 401–1,000 weekly attendees
$699/year
Annual access priced for a midsize or large congregation.
Churches above 1,000 / multi-campus
$999/year / custom
The largest listed single-church tier; multi-campus organizations should request written scope and pricing.
The no-cost tier is useful for a small pilot, but use representative volunteers and the full consent language rather than quietly testing on real members.
Paid pricing is annual and based on weekly attendance, not completed responses; confirm how attendance is calculated and how campuses are grouped.
If a free survey crosses fifty submissions, collection can continue while the additional results remain inaccessible until payment.
Official guidance says unsubscribing preserves the ability to view and download individual data but removes insights, resources, tutorials, risk analysis, and new-response access; confirm retention and deletion in writing.
Where Scatter falls behind
Replace broad data-rights language with purpose-limited terms that clearly prioritize respondent and church ownership, portability, deletion, and prohibition on unrelated profiling.
Offer a genuinely anonymous mode, minimum cohort thresholds, automatic small-cell suppression, configurable field removal, and separate consent for identity disclosure.
Publish a complete security and subprocessor package covering encryption, MFA, audit logs, regions, backups, incidents, testing, retention, and verified deletion.
Add granular roles, administrator activity logs, export watermarking, automatic expiration, respondent self-access, correction, withdrawal, and deletion tools.
Provide clearer multilingual and accessibility documentation plus validated guidance for interpreting results without stereotyping or overstating causation.
Scatter vs. SurveyMonkey vs. a ChMS form vs. listening sessions
SurveyMonkey and generic forms are more customizable but leave question design and interpretation to the church. A ChMS form keeps data near existing records but reinforces attendance-centered categories. Listening sessions provide nuance and relationship but are slower and harder to summarize. Scatter supplies the strongest ready-made work-and-vocation framework.
Choose Scatter when its fixed adult questions match a defined ministry decision and the church can govern identifiable data. Choose an anonymous generic survey when only broad sentiment is needed, or facilitated conversations when context, trust, and member agency matter more than a dashboard.
The strongest approach uses Scatter for voluntary baseline patterns, listening groups to understand those patterns, and a public action report. Do not treat the dashboard as the voice of nonrespondents or as permission to target individuals.
The bottom line
Scatter can help a church see gifts, pressures, callings, and neighborhood connections that ordinary attendance reports miss. The questions are thoughtful, the survey is short, the first tier is accessible, and the annual pricing is clear. Its power makes governance nonnegotiable: the vendor and church assert strong rights, identifiable answers are available, and filtered vocational and spiritual data can affect trust. Invite rather than compel, disclose individual access in plain language, minimize administrators and exports, suppress small cohorts, honor withdrawal, and show members how their generosity produced better ministry.
Alternatives to Scatter
Planning Center PeopleForms and workflows inside a broader church database, without Scatter’s specialized vocation framework.Google FormsA familiar low-cost form builder that requires deliberate privacy settings and local analysis.Barna research toolsBroader church and cultural research resources with a different survey and benchmarking model.Facilitated listening groupsSlower and less quantifiable, but capable of context, consent, questions, and relationship.Frequently asked questions
What does Scatter measure?
It asks adults about work, purpose, faith-work integration, church support, relationships, skills, community activity, and causes they value.
How long does the Scatter survey take?
The directory and product materials describe roughly twenty-five questions taking about five to seven minutes.
Is Scatter free?
A church can review up to fifty responses free. Annual paid tiers begin at $99 and scale with weekly attendance.
Can a church see individual responses?
Yes. Official privacy and product materials indicate the requesting church can receive aggregate and individual survey information.
Can the questions be customized?
No. Scatter keeps a standardized question set to preserve the survey framework and integrity.
Does Scatter integrate with church software?
No direct ChMS integration was documented. CSV export can support careful matching of names and emails when respondents were told and consented.
How should a church introduce Scatter?
Explain the purpose, every reader and use, individual visibility, optionality, retention, withdrawal, and planned response before sharing the link.
Sources & further reading
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