Impact

“were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us and opened the scriptures to us?”

The words of Jesus’ disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24v32 are the inspiration and prayer behind Burning Heart. Our vision is to make great films that will open the scriptures to those who watch, helping them meet with God, that he would make their hearts burn within them. We also want to make them available to everyone for free!

The most important aspects of that aren’t something that can be easily measured - how do you measure encounters with God?

Fortunately though many other key elements of what we are trying to do can be measured - we know how many films we make (and that they’re free), we can get your feedback on the quality of our films, and we can also tell roughly how many people watch each film.

When we launched Burning Heart at the start of 2022, we set three specific and measurable goals that we hoped to achieve by the summer of 2023. We assessed our performance against those goals (and others) at the end of August 2023. This is what we found…

Making Film Series (90%)
Goal: to have made 4 high-quality film series

At the end of August 2023 we were just finishing production of our 4th series (Pursuing Peace: Philippians 4v4-9), with a launch date set for 1 November 2023.

While we were slightly behind our numerical target, we have been really pleased with the quality of the film series we have made. We have had excellent feedback on all our series from a range of individuals and partners, both in terms of content and production quality. The production quality has also improved series by series.

Film Views (100+%)
Goal: to have had over 20,000 views of our films across all platforms (excluding trailers)

We have hugely exceeded our original target for numbers of views by summer 2023, largely due to our films appearing on the YouVersion Bible App, which has been an exciting partnership.

In total our films have been watched almost 400,000 times (393,000), with 7 individual films having exceeded our 20,000 view target on their own. Our most watched episode has been the first episode of our Deuteronomy series, which has been watched over 87,000 times, followed by the first episode of our Prayer series, which has been watched over 62,500 times.

These numbers also do not take into consideration one of our most exciting partnerships, with all our films having aired on GOD TV - while GOD TV is available in over 300m homes, they do not collect actual viewing statistics.

Small Groups running our series (40%)
Goal: to have had more than 100 church groups run a Burning Heart series.

Disappointingly we have had low number of small groups registering with us on our website. Just 40 groups had registered on our website by the end of August 2023, well below our original (and fairly modest) target of 100. While we know that some groups have run the series without registering, we believe that the numbers are indeed low - and this is a an area we are looking to target for growth in the next year. Could you help us spread the word? Are you aware that all our series come with various extra resources to help small groups run them as a course?

Other Metrics
The goals outlined above are what we think are the key performance indicators (that can be measured) for us as a ministry, but there are other significant elements, including:

Fundraising and keeping our films free…
We have been able to fully fund all our films from donations and giving to this point, keeping them free for everyone. A significant part of that has been seed capital that was donated or pledged when we launched though - we are aware that we need to up our fundraising effectiveness as we move into the next phase of our ministry. Could you help by giving? If so, please visit our giving page here.

Social Media
We believe that social media has amazing gospel and ministry potential, as well as being a core tool for any modern ministry. Our vision is focused on longer-episode films, with social media as a support and shop window for our wider ministry. We have been really fortunate to have someone brilliant running our social media, and our two key channels have been growing significantly (albeit from a very very low base) - at the end of August 2023 we had 921 instagram followers and 607 instagram followers. We’d love you to join them! Follow us on instagram here, and YouTube here.

Find out more…

If you would like to find out more about how Burning Heart could resource your church or small group, please let us know here, or if you are an individual wanting to know more just get in touch here.

We would also like to ask whether you might consider giving towards Burning Heart, as all our funding comes through donations - if you feel you could help support our future ministry and resources, please visit our giving page.