2 Year Mormon Metrics Meta-Analysis
A Few Metrics, Thoughts, and Future Direction
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It has now been two years since I launched Mormon Metrics. To celebrate, I wanted to share a few fun milestones and—well—some meta metrics of the newsletter itself. This is a metrics newsletter, after all!
Newsletter Health
Subscribers: We went from 300 to 1400+ active readers since last year.
Traffic: We passed 100,000 website views (currently sitting at 115,000 views).
Engagement: We average a newsletter open rate of 50% to 60%
Reach: Our subscribers span 43 US states and 39 countries. More countries are now included thanks to Substack’s new language translation features!
Substack Network: A huge thank you to the writers who recommend this newsletter on Substack, including the one and only Ryan Burge 🎉
Shaping the Public Conversation
We released two public reports and an interactive dashboard this past year:
The Mormon Typology Report(link): Learn about the 4 types of Mormons reshaping the church in the modern age.
The Temple Premium: Fact or Folklore?(link): Read an econometric analysis of the impact of temples on surrounding house prices using 15 years of Zillow data across 43 temples.
Church Growth Trends Dashboard(link): Explore worldwide church growth trends from the 1970s until the latest data released this past April 2026.
This past year, our findings, data visualizations, and commentary were featured in:
The Salt Lake Tribune
Deseret News
Religion News Service
KUER (Utah’s NPR Affiliate)
Host a podcast? If you want to dive into the data of any of these topics (or anything i’ve written about on my weekly emails) on your show, shoot me an email—I’m always happy to join.
Behind-the-Scenes: Consulting Work
Between newsletter drops, I’ve had the privilege of acting as a quantitative partner across a fascinating range of projects:
The American Communities Project: Authored two data-driven local Utah features exploring Education and “Polite Polarization.”
Book Projects: Consulted on data analysis for Jeff Strong’s book Torn, as well as another exciting upcoming book release coming very soon.
Sector-Spanning Analytics: This past year, I’ve partnered with three other organizations to solve complex data science problems across business, academia, and civic engagement.
The Day Job: And yes, in my “spare” time, I am navigating my third year contracting with Meta as a full-time data scientist.
If you are looking for a survey or data science consultant for an upcoming project, let’s talk. You can reach me at alex@bassempirical.com.
Goals for Year Three
“Data-In-The-Weeds” Audio: I’m brainstorming a low-frequency, high-depth audio series. When a compelling new book or dataset drops, I want to host casual, technical conversations that bypass the high-level summaries and really dig into the charts, data, and details. What do you think?
More Tools: I want to publish more reports and interactive tools (I’ll be announcing the details of my most ambitious project yet next week!).
More Connections: I want to meet and collaborate with more people in this space! Reach out if you want to connect 🙂 If you want to reach me outside of the inbox, you can find me here:
Also, a reminder to please take the reader survey, I appreciate your feedback:
👉Share your unfiltered thoughts in the 2-question anonymous reader survey here👈
Thanks for supporting me on this exciting journey 🙏
See you next week!