Preparing for your church launch? Nothing beats hard data – especially when it comes to understanding the ethnic make-up of your target audience.

We all may feel like we understand the community in which we live, but often our impressions are just reflections of the groups that we're personally associated with. If you happen to hail from an Anglo background it's possible you don't realise just how ethnically diverse your suburb is.

Small Multiples are data visualisation specialists based in Sydney and they have generated a series of scalable maps of Australia's capital cities that map our ethnic origins. The result is a highly useful 'snapshot' of not only the dominent ethnicity of each suburb, but the second and third-place getters as well. You'll be surprised to see just how low an English origin ranks in Australian society:

Click here for an ethnic snapshot of your capital city

Preparing to launch in an ethnically diverse suburb? It's worth bearing in mind that Australians are also born travellers. Anyone coming to your church might actually be crossing several suburbs to do so, so pay close attention to the suburbs around your target area as well.

And if you'd like more helpful information on building ethnically sensitive outreach we'd encourage you to take a look at our Resource Library's Multiculturalism and Ministry collection, as well as the talks from Multiply14 where developing ethnic ministries was the focal topic for the three day event.

God bless,

Scott Sanders