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Church Websites and Effective Outreach Study Results
Drew Goodmanson (who’s sporting a very nice new WordPress look) posted a day or so ago the results from the study they had conducted concering the “State of the Church Online.”
I was unfortunately unable to attend the webinar due to a last minute lunch meeting, but thankfully they’ve posted some overview stats.
The results are honestly not all that surprising, but they do serve as valuable reminders about how we design and build our ministry and church websites.
These facts here we’re good mind-food, especially for the visitors perspective:
Visitors
- 77% said the church website was somewhat to very important in my decision to attend the church.
- 83% said the church website was somewhat to very important in facilitating their participation in the church community.
Beginners
- 45% said the church website was somewhat to very important for their ongoing discipleship and spiritual growth.
- 73% said the church website was somewhat to very important in sharing their faith with others (friends, business colleagues, others)
Regulars
- 27% said they visit the church website more than once a week.
- Feature Rated Most important: Listen or ability to download Sermons.
- Most requested functionality: Ability to post prayer requests or needs.
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Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads
For our Dodge Hunger event I am running a Facebook ad. You can learn more about the lock in, dodge ball tourney, and food drive at www.dodgehunger.com. So far, we have had 5,355 people look at the ad but only one has clicked on it. I have only had to pay 18 cents so far. I think that is a good price to have over 5,000 people look at my ad.
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10 Design rules to keep in Mind
I found these helpful hints here and thought I would pass them along to you. I am sure some of you dont have degrees in graphic design but still design, so maybe these tips will be worth looking over.
10 design rules to keep in mind
(1) Communicate — don’t decorate.
(2) Speak with a visual voice.
(3) Use two typeface families maximum. OK, maybe three.
(4) Pick colors on purpose.
(5) If you can do it with less, then do it.
(6) Negative space is magical — create it, don’t just fill it up!
(7) Treat the type as image, as though it’s just as important.
(8) Be universal; remember that it’s not about you.
(9) Be decisive. Do it on purpose — or don’t do it at all.
(10) Symmetry is the ultimate evil.
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Yammer - What are you working on?
I wrote a post recently on accountability here at another blog I have for my Sunday School Class. What I mentioned was that every task must be matched up with some sort of accountability for it to be effective. I really do believe that, but it is very often hard to find a good system that will work for all the unique tasks of ministry.
But Yammer seems to really fit the bill.
Keep You and Your Team Accountable
If you are going to be productive you and your staff are going to have to keep plugging away at whatever is before you, but how do you stay on the same page and stay on task? Yammer is a small application that just has one task - to keep everyone accountable as to what they are doing all day.
It asks one question - “What are you working on?” and displays the answers as a running list. You can watch as things are accomplished throughout your network and even see real time hindrances to productivity.
This is a real time shot of our group to give you an idea.
It also makes you evaluate yourself before you publicize what you are about to spend time on.
Help, Don’t Hinder Your Productivity
Some things that are supposed to help productivity take so much time to maintain that they actually hinder it, but this is only one sentence for every task. So simple.
You can update your status on the website, their desktop application, by text message, email, or a free application on your iPhone or Blackberry. (I have coupled it with Fluid on my Mac and have it in my menubar.)
Go to yammer.com and watch their 2 minute video about how it works and hopefully it will help you and your team get more done.
It is FREE.
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Feedburner - Analyze, Optimize, and Publicize your Blog
This is the #1 tool to partner with your blog, podcast, or other feed. It is a free service, owned by Google, that adds some great functionality to your blog.
Provides one permanent feed address no matter where your blog may ever move to.
This is my biggest reason for advocating Feedburner. It’s a great safety net. Most people will get the idea to start a blog, and even jump in, before they know what they want completely. That is good but usually will lead to limitations in the future by being locked to the platform you started with. If you decide to move, every single user is unsubscribed and must subscribe again. This usually loses 30%-50% of the readers immediately just for upgrading.
Feedburner solves this problem. It allows you to have a public address that will never change, while giving the flexibility behind the scenes to change the location, host, or platform to anything you want, anytime you want. When you use it, just make sure users subscribe to the feedburner address. (i.e. feeds.feedburner.com/MinistryTools)
Gives ability for your content to be delivered by email.
Feed readers like Google Reader are great, but the majority of normal people still don’t use them. But everyone knows and understands email great. Feedburner converts a complicated updating blog to email and emails everyone with the new content. Notice the entry form on the side of this blog.
Gives statistics about your readers.
Ever wonder who is reading what you write? Feedburner gives those detailed statistics as well.
Builds interaction into posts.
Notice at the bottom of this post. It places these links into the content whether it be on the site, in a feed reader, or in email.
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Priceless Podcasts for Pastors (Ways to do podcasts for free)
Media is one of the great tools that we have at our disposal, and podcasts and other types of feeds are very useful for distributing a wide variety of content to the masses.
Here are some types of “podcasts” and other “feeds” that you can use, for free, and the type of media distributed.
- Regular podcast - the easiest way to do a plain audio podcast that I have found is with gcast. I have written about this before, so you can check out the post on it.
- Video podcasts, feeds, or live sreaming - If you want to make your media that you distribute a little more interesting you can do a video podcast. You record it (that would be another post), but once you have it in a digital format you can upload it to a number of different sites that allow people to subscribe to be notified when you update it.
- YouTube - This is the best for trying to get highlights out. Or anything else, really, because of its popularity, but the limitation is that it only allows for 10 minutes.
- Vimeo - Better quality and longer durations allowed, but basically like YouTube. Gaining popularity.
- Google Video - Unlimited and simple to understand. Like everything else that Google does.
- Ustream.tv - What our church uses. Supports live video streaming of services and records/hosts them for posterity. You can embed a player on your website like YouTube and have it play default programming that you set up when there is nothing live. You may see the embedded version here, and the dedicated Ustream page here.
- Blogs - never actually seen it done, but you could start a blog for sermon notes and embed the video into it.
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Online Giving - Easy Tithe
A great feature that you could add to your website is the ability to give online. Any user in the world can log on to your site, give, and money can be directly deposited into YOUR account.
Now, how do you do it?
There are 2 easy options I will tell you about: Paypal and Easy Tithe.
First, Paypal. Paypal is pretty much the standard of online transactions and is a partner of Ebay to help with all the money that that site moves. Being such, they are incredibly convenient and easy to set up.
A few things you want to know about Paypal:
- There is no monthly fee - only fees come from transactions (about 2.9%, I believe)
- The money is held by Paypal like an bank account, it doesn’t go directly into your account though it is simple to set that up.
- A giver can give in a variety of methods and doesn’t even need to sign up with Paypal.
Now, Easy Tithe. Easy Tithe is really optimized for churches and it shows. It makes things very simple and has many options that might push you toward that.- Givers can set up scheduled giving (so they never miss)
- Powerful reporting features to graph all the giving
- Donations are always in your control, directly deposited into your accounts.
- Can setup different funds to give to on the website
- Can use it for camp registration, for example, and have options (like a shirt, etc.) that can change the price.
- Costs $50/month to use the program but can be used for an unlimited number of users and has no transaction fees. (only fees are from your merchant account you set up with your bank)
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Jott.com
One of my favorite tools. A free one. Are you ever somewhere, think of something, but don’t have a good place to write it down to remember it?? Do you use email and have a cell phone? Then Jott is for you.
Here is how you use it.
- Call Jott. (after you set up your account)
- It will ask, “Who do you want to Jott?”
- Say, “Me.”
- It will beep like an answering machine, and then you simply speak what you want to remember.
- It then transcribes what you say (quite accurately too), sends you an email of the transcription, and includes the recording of your voice for any confusion.
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Backup and Sync Contacts - Plaxo
Plaxo is actually a full-fledged social networking site now, but one of the greatest features of it is the ability to backup your address book from your Mac or PC for free.
Any address that you have on your volatile computer is safe on Plaxo because it automatically syncs without you even noticing it.
Also, if anyone in your address book is also a member with Plaxo, if they ever update their information, it is automatically updated on Plaxo, and in your local address book.
It will send you Birthday reminders to give you a great excuse to contact people you want to stay up with and will link with other websites, blogs, and calendars to keep everything in one place.
Some nice features, for free. Check it out here.
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Find Music - Rhapsody, iTunes
Today I am working all day on finding special music, scheduling, and planning. That means I am making full use of Ministry Tools. Putting the whole schedule on Airset, looking through my library on iTunes, and listening to music on Rhapsody.
So, I thought I would give a few more tools to help with music for your church. It is always a hassle for me trying to gather cd’s, listen to tapes, and try to figure out sheet music. I am a lot better at hearing a song and saying, “I like that.”
That is why I use iTunes and Rhapsody, a lot. They both work off the same concept - finding a song or artist you like. While that is hugely valuable, what makes it wonderful is the ability to find similar songs or artists. Let me explain.
Lets say you know about a particular song that you like. I dont know why, but I am thinking of “Step Into the Water”. Once you search for “step into the water” it will bring up a big list of people who sing that. If they sing that song, they will likely sing another you like. So, you can start to look into that new group, find songs that they sing and discover songs very quickly. It is an intermingled web — which is good for finding stuff.
iTunes gives you 30sec previews of unlimited number of songs and cost $.99 to buy each one.
Rhapsody is membership based, but gives you 25 free plays. After that it is $12.99/month for unlimited songs. You can only listen to them on their site though.
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This is about tricks of the trade. Tips and tools for you to be more organized, efficient, and effective in this technological age. There are millions of webpages and advertisements, but which one is really the best? This is an unbiased log of recommended tools that have proved helpful in the ministry. You wont use all [...]
Asides
Welcome to Ministry Tools
This is about tricks of the trade. Tips and tools for you to be more organized, efficient, and effective in this technological age.
This is an unbiased log of recommended tools that have proved helpful in the ministry. You wont use all of them, of course, but I am sure some will prove invaluable.
I am the singles, music, and media director at Vision Baptist Church in Alpharetta, GA. I am also usually broke and need inexpensive ways to do the ministry. This blog is to inform you of the most effective tools that I have found.
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