Five More Talents: Newsletter

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Here are featured articles from past issues of the newsletter:

Five Questions Every Church Planter Must Ask about His Church Website (May '10)
Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Church Website (Jan '10)
Social Media and Your Church Website (Nov '09)
Content Management and Your Church Website (Oct '09)

Five Questions Every Church Planter Must Ask about His Church Website

Leadership, usability, content strategy, and analytics are as important as a snazzy design when it comes to the success of your church website.

1. Who's in charge? Is somebody in charge? Is anybody in charge?

Almost all of the pastors I know work overtime preparing sermons and shepherding the flock. That's as it should be. Pastors should focus on pastoring, and delegate the responsibility of maintaining the church website to trustworthy, reliable stewards. Sometimes this can be done effectively on a volunteer basis. But volunteers often lose interest in the project over time. That is why it can be a good investment to pay someone to keep your church website up-to-date.

2. Is the church website easy-to-use, fast, and simple?

To paraphrase the apostle, does your church website "take every pixel captive"? In Planting an Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Rev. Ross Graham reminds us that a church website is a form of advertising.

"The purpose of advertising," writes Rev. Graham, "is to get people to visit the church’s services of worship, where they will be exposed to the preaching of God’s Word. Therefore, such advertising must be factual and easily and quickly read" (emphasis mine).

In other words, sometimes overzealous web designers need to be reminded to restrain themselves. Visual pyrotechnics can actually hurt a site if they slow it down or amount to a confusing user interface.

3. Do you have a plan for driving traffic to the church website?

"If you build it, they will come." Wouldn't that be nice? Unfortunately, websites don't work that way. Even though in principle a website is visible to the entire world, in practice you must implement a plan to make the intended audience of your church website aware of its existence. A few tips:

Many people will hear about your church via word of mouth. Have someone verify that your website uses semantic HTML markup for maximum visibility in search engines.
Avail yourself of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. Set up a Facebook page for your church as a complement to your church website.
Consider experimenting with targeted online advertising via Facebook or Google Ads.
Make sure that the URL of your church website is listed prominently on road signs or banners for your church, as well as on business cards and other print advertising materials.

4. Do you have a way to measure the effectiveness of your church website as an advertising tool?

Five More Talents takes time every month to analyze the site traffic statistics for every church website we serve. We share this information with church leaders and use it to identify ways to improve each church website. The importance of traffic analysis was the topic of our last feature article.

5. Does the church website make a good first impression?

Design is the first thing people will notice about your church website. Make sure the design of the website is aesthetically pleasing. Effective designs are distinctive and simple.

Three good questions -- out of many -- to ask about the design of your church website:

Is it based on some kind of visual metaphor? The visual metaphor can be overt (MailChimp's banana-loving postman) or subtle and minimalistic (Google's use of blue, red, orange, and green).
Does it respect "the fold"? The fold is the bottom border of your web browser window. As a general rule, the most important elements in a design should be "above the fold." They should be visible without forcing the user to scroll.
Is the typography optimized for readability? One key factor is "characters per line." Lines with more than 100 characters are usually less easy to read.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Church Website

Scenario: You've just spent a lot of money putting up a website for a church plant. You paid a few thousand dollars to come up with a snazzy, colorful graphic design. You "go live" with the site and wait for the visitors to come. And then ... nothing happens. No new visitors come. To say you're a bit underwhelmed is the understatement of the decade.

You began your church website project with high hopes of harnessing the power of the Internet and the World Wide Web on behalf of your local church. You know that fewer and fewer people turn to the Yellow Pages when they're looking for a church, and more and more are turning to the Internet. But now you've spent precious time and money on a website, and it doesn't seem like it has made much of a difference. No new visitors. You're disappointed, frustrated, and perhaps even a bit angry.

What should you do next? Well, probably a lot of things, most of which are beyond the scope of this article. But one of them should be to implement a plan for measuring the effectiveness of your church website.

A Matter of Stewardship

"Know well the condition of your flocks," the Biblical proverb goes. "And give attention to your herds, for riches do not last forever" (Prov 27:23-24a).

Measuring the effectiveness of your church website is essential if you want to be a good steward of your investment. Just as shepherds must be diligent to look after their flocks, so church leaders must be diligent to measure the effectiveness of their church websites.

Why? Because church websites don't always produce the desired results right away, and because even effective church websites tend to become less effective over time when they are neglected.

Incidentally, most church leaders will probably find that it is best to delegate this task to a faithful steward. This will allow them to stay focused on the ministry of the word and their other pastoral responsibilities.

What Can Be Measured

Analyzing website traffic is the main component of measuring the effectiveness of your church website. Thankfully, website traffic analysis tools have come a long way since the days of "hit counters." For example, free tools such as Google Analytics can provide answers to questions such as the following:

How many visitors does your church website receive each day? Each week? Each month?
Where are these visitors physically located? (i.e., what country, what state, what city)
What are the sources of traffic to your church website?
- Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing?
- Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube?
- Denominational websites such as opc.org or pcanet.org?
What keywords send visitors to your church website from search engines?
- The name of your church?
- The name of a church leader mentioned on your website?
- The name of your city?
- A theological distinctive? (e.g., Reformed, Presbyterian)
What pages do visitors to your website view? Which pages are the most viewed?
How long do visitors spend on each page?
What percentage of visitors abandon your website after viewing just one page?

What to Do With This Information

First, commit to a process of ongoing improvement and maintenance of your church website. Website traffic data can be enormously helpful when it comes time to make decisions about your church website.

Taking the time to analyze the traffic of your church website does two things:

It helps you test your assumptions for their validity
It helps you to identify what is most important

Testing Your Assumptions - For example, if you have built your church website on the assumption that it will attract visitors located within your city, this assumption needs to be tested. Website traffic analysis enables you to test this assumption.

Identifying What is Most Important - Analyzing the visitors to your church website will help you to identify what content they view the most. This helps you understand what parts of your website are most important to improve and maintain.

Second, be intentional about asking visitors to your worship services what influenced them to visit your congregation. Ask them, "Was our church website an important factor in influencing you to visit our church?" When you combine website traffic analysis data with what you learn from your ongoing informal survey of visitors, you are sure to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of your church website.

Social Media and Your Church Website

Social media websites such as Facebook now dominate the attention of web users. How this should change the way you view your church website, and what you should do as a result.

Social media websites have experienced explosive growth in the past 12 months. One year ago, web users spent less than 10% of their time on "Community" websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Now, Web users spend nearly one-quarter of their time on such sites (Source: Online Publishers Association).

Facebook, in particular, dominates the attention of web users. Consider the profile of the average Internet user in the United States -- call him Average Joe (Source: The Nielsen Company). During the month of September, Average Joe...

spent 68 hours online -- that's over two hours per day
spent more time on Facebook than on any other single website -- that's over five hours per month
spent, by contrast, an average of only 57 seconds per web page

But that's just Average Joe. For some young people, Facebook practically is the Internet. According to UK Facebook expert Robert Grant, many young people spend four 20 minute sessions on Facebook every day.

Is Your Church Website for "Insiders" Only?

Even if you ignore Facebook and other social media websites, your church website will still receive visitors. However, virtually all of those visitors will probably fall into three categories:

Congregational Insiders - People who already know the address of your website because they are members of your congregation or regular visitors at worship
Word-of-Mouth Contacts - People who already know the name of your church and/or its pastor because of a positive face-to-face interaction with him or with a Congregational Insider
Denominational Insiders - People who are committed to visiting and joining congregations of a particular denominational identity (for example, Orthodox Presbyterian or PCA) and have used a denominational website to look up your local congregation

Don't misunderstand me. Word-of-Mouth Contacts, Congregational Insiders, and Denominational Insiders are website visitors you want to have! They are certainly welcome at worship service on Sunday!

But what about all those other people you had hoped would visit your church website, and in turn, join you for worship? What about those in your community who are looking for salvation but don't know where to look or what to search for?

New Rules and New Opportunities for Your Church Website

Five years ago, simply getting your site registered with a search engine and listing it with a denominational website was usually quite effective. Today, search engines and directory websites are still important. But Facebook and its kin have changed the rules of the game and opened up new opportunities.

How has Facebook changed the rules of the game? Today, a website is regarded as merely the hub of an organization's overall "web presence." The web presence for an organization now typically includes pages on Facebook and Twitter, RSS feeds, and opt-in email lists -- all in addition to the website itself.

Why? Because these other parts of the "web presence" excel where search engines fall short. With search engines, people need to know what they are looking for ahead of time in order to find it. With social media, people only need to know who they want to "hang out with." This provides greater scope for personal influence based on relationships and bonds of trust.

Consider an analogy. Facebook is like the ancient Athenian marketplace. Like those who frequented the Athenian marketplace in the first century, Facebook users "spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new" (Acts 17:21). Facebook's "News Feed" is its lifeblood. It consists of casual interactions between acquaintances on every topic imaginable, from the ridiculous to the sublime.

The Athenian marketplace was the center of a city "full of idols" (vs. 16), but the Apostle Paul considered the Athenian marketplace a ripe opportunity for ministry, and he reasoned with "those who happened to be there" (vs. 17). Similarly, Facebook and other social media websites are a ripe opportunity for 21st-century church planters.

To summarize: Social media websites such as Facebook offer you an opportunity to connect with people in your community who aren't yet Congregational Insiders, Denominational Insiders, or Word-of-Mouth Contacts, but may be interested in visiting and joining your congregation. In other words, unlike search engines and denominational church directories, social media websites can be used to generate an awareness of your local church among acquaintances in your community.

Ways Church Leaders Can Take Action

In future articles, we will explore in greater depth various models for using Facebook and other social media, and interview church leaders who are doing so. But here are a few ideas to get you started:

If you're not already using Facebook, consider talking to pastors and youth leaders who are already using Facebook. Get some advice before you take the plunge.
Once you are on Facebook, connect with former classmates from college, or seminary. Listen a lot. Ask a few questions to people you trust. Join a few Facebook groups about topics you are interested in.
Be intentional about using Facebook to connect with people in your local community. Most cities have Facebook groups. Listen to what people are saying in the various Facebook community groups.
After hanging out for a few months and learning online etiquette, start posting information about your church in status updates. Observe how people react. Find out what impact this has on traffic to your church website.

Bottom line, be purposeful about your use of social media websites. Like the ancient Athenian marketplace, Facebook and its "sister cities" are full of time-wasting, soul-stealing distractions. But like the ancient Athenian marketplace, there are people there ready to hear and respond to the Gospel. They just don't know it yet.

Content Management and Your Church Website

Five More Talents' content management services differentiate us from most other church web design agencies. In this article, we define the term "content management" and explain its importance to the effectiveness of your church website.

What is Content Management?

Definitions: By content, we mean primarily text content, but also graphics, photography, audio, and video content. By management, we mean updating this content on a regular basis -- ideally on a weekly basis -- according to a strategic plan.

Content management can be done in-house using volunteers and church staff. Or it can be delegated to trusted specialists such as Five More Talents. Either way, no church website should be without a content management strategy.

Why is Content Management Important?

Many factors influence the effectiveness of a website, not least the colors, graphics, and photography which make up its design. But while an attractive design is crucial for making a good first impression, maintaining your website content is the only way to make sure your website does not become stale over time.

Attention to little things can make a big difference. Consider the "zero tolerance" policies of Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York City in the early 1990s. In an effort to reduce New York City's crime rate and improve quality of life, Mayor Giuliani ordered the police to be tougher on petty crimes such as graffiti vandalism, subway fare evasion, and drunkenness in public. NYC's violent crime rate fell precipitously after 1990, and many researchers credit Giuliani's "zero tolerance" policies for the improvement. He paid attention to the "little" crimes, and thus deterred the larger ones, too.

Preventative Maintenance

Like Mayor Giuliani, we advocate a "zero tolerance" policy: A zero tolerance policy for stale content on your church website. We recommend updating your website on a weekly basis, so that nothing has an opportunity to go stale. This prevents visitors to your church website from losing confidence in your website as a source of reliable, up-to-date information.

A Commitment to Excellence

Of course, if you are going to update your content, make sure it's good content -- well-written, well-photographed, well-recorded, and well-designed. Note that good text content is of particular importance because:

it engages readers of your website
it tends to increase your search engine rankings and traffic
it promotes a greater likelihood of quality links to your website

For example, many churches could improve the effectiveness of their online audio sermon libraries by adding brief text abstracts or teasers of their sermons. A text abstract of a sermon (longer then just a title) engages potential listeners, increasing the likelihood that they will listen. It also provides content which search engines can index, since search engine spiders don't understand audio very well.

Common Objections Answered

Objection: "This seems like far too much work on insignificant details!"

Answer: In the short term content management may seem insignificant, but it is indisputably important in the long term. No one is likely to pay much attention to a website which obviously hasn't been updated for a few years. The more up-to-date your website is, the more likely visitors to your website are likely to regard it as a trusted source of information. Putting up a website without a content management strategy is simply foolhardy.

The principle behind content management is the same as the principle behind mowing the front lawn at your church building, pulling weeds, changing the oil on your car, and saving ten percent of your income each month: You reap what you sow.

Objection: "Investing time and money in keeping our church website up-to-date and high quality is a distraction from the real work of the church."

Answer: We agree that it would be possible to spend an excessive amount of time and money keeping your church website up-to-date. But the majority of churches do not have this problem. They have the opposite problem of investing too little in their church website.

If nothing else, investing in your church website is worthwhile because of the amount of time most people aged 20 to 50 spend on the Internet.

Is Content "King"?

Updating your church website regularly is crucial to its effectiveness. "Content is king," as the saying goes.

But how do you put your content in front of the right people? In our November issue, we'll tackle this problem by looking at the role social media sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) play in putting your content in front of the right people. As one commentator put it, "if content is king, then distribution would have to be the ace!"

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