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by Cullen Swanson
Cullen began his marketing & media career as a Project Manager for Kenneth Hagin Ministries managing advertising, event planning, and the production of The Word of Faith, a monthly magazine.
It wasn't long before Cullen found what he really enjoys doing—driving the planning and the creative behind projects, and seeing them from the rocky start to a successful finish.
It was in this process that he saw a need for a full service media company that focused its energy on helping business owners and ministry leaders maximize their potential and make an impact by providing a "one stop shop" for all of their advertising, media, and marketing needs to be met.
His company, Innovated Media, is a locally owned media company that specializes in logo & stationery design, print graphic design, turn-key direct mail campaigns, web design, and video production.
There is no denying that the Internet has proven to be a mainstream tool of communication for much of our society. Just five years ago, I remember speaking with several pastors and ministry leaders that told me, “Yeah, we’re probably going to get a website or something because everyone else is getting one.” Little did they (and many others) know that the Internet would become one of the quickest, least expensive, and most powerful ways to spread God’s Word.
Instead of “jumping on the bandwagon” and getting a website simply because it would look bad if you didn’t have one, I believe ministries and churches should be quick to implement the newest technologies to share the Gospel and convey to their local communities the different ways they can serve them and make them better.
We (Innovated Media) prefer to develop websites for churches and ministries because we believe that they have a unique advantage online to businesses and other types of organizations for several reasons.
The primary reason, I believe, is that unlike a business or ecommerce site, people are less apprehensive to spend more time on a church website because they know the focus of the site will be more about what activities are going on instead of trying to sell you something; the content is less “selly" and invasive. Also, most churches always have something coming up that is event related, so the site should constantly be changing with new content, new sermons to listen or download, etc. The focus is less about making money, and more about how the church can serve its audience. This blows the doors wide open on what you can do with a website. The possibilities are nearly endless and much more forgiving; dozens of different areas and user-friendly tools could be developed on a church’s website, and as the church grows, every single area of the site will appeal to someone at some point.
It is more challenging for a business to do this with their site because everything a business does will (or should) be justified by a return on investment (ROI), and the content is usually the same unless the services that they offer change dramatically. Even then, most visitors are probably just looking for a way to contact the business so they aren’t on the site for longer than a minute or two.
Below are a few ideas to get started on how you can use not only your church’s website, but how to use some of the current technologies to expand your ministry’s influence.
1. Email Newsletters. If You Aren’t, You Should
First, if you aren’t sending at least a monthly e-newsletter, you need to. It’s a common sense answer to cutting down on expenses by avoiding postage costs while still providing an avenue to communicate with the people on your mailing list. The emails are easily put together and can be done in a very short time and sent out immediately. Two companies that provide this service that we recommend are Constant Contact and Intellicontact. Both are equally reputable services that provide powerful tools to get the job done with Intellicontact a little more on the user-friendly side of putting together the actual e-newsletter.
Second, e-newsletters are a fantastic way to boost traffic to your website. Members of your church may not type up an email to a friend inviting them to visit the church website, but they may be more inclined to forward a church e-newsletter to a friend that may need to read what’s in it. This is a very non-invasive way to reach a friend or invite them to see what the church website has to offer by following whatever links in the e-newsletter that lead to the church’s website!
Third, use an e-newsletter for your weekly bulletin and upcoming events. Churches tend to spend a lot of money on printing. Weekly bulletins can rack up costs pretty quickly. If you are looking to minimize print costs, I would encourage you to set a date that you will either stop printing weekly bulletins, or announce that you are only going to print a handful for those that still do not want to “get on that Internet thing.” Make a hard push during that announcement period to collect all of the member’s and attendee’s email addresses and get your database built up. For those that are uncomfortable with giving their email address out, provide the weekly e-newsletter or bulletin in PDF format and make it easy to find on your website so they still at least have access to it.
You won’t please everyone with this system, but then again, it’s not really practical to wait for everyone to get on the “Internet bandwagon” before you start taking advantage of good technology to operate more efficiently and possibly free up some budget money for something important.
Build Your Mailing List Because it Won’t Build Itself
What’s the quickest way to build your e-database? Here are a few ideas:
1. If you already send out snail mail to church members/attenders regularly, or have a quarterly newsletter type mailing, include an insert that asks for their email address, and provide a postage paid return envelope. The small investment you pay on the return postage is a lot less than what you’d pay if you bought an email list from a listing company – especially since you have already established a relationship with that person. That’s a good lead, and money well spent.
2. Train church secretaries to ask for email addresses from church members when they call the office. I once held a contest in an office that I worked out of for a client while I was there doing some design work for a direct mail project. I helped answer the phone and told the other 4 people in the office that if anyone can beat the number of e-newsletter signups that I can get in one week, I’d buy everyone lunch on Friday. At the end of one week between the 5 of us, we gathered nearly 200 signups. If you relied on your website to provide that many signups all by itself, it would take a lot longer than a week (realistically closer to 5 or 6 months, depending on your web traffic). I believe this to be the fastest way to get your mailing list built up. Just ask!
3. If you have an extra computer or laptop that can be used in the information booth or lobby, ask people that come up for information to sign up while they are there, and get them signed up on the spot before, after, or in-between services!
4. Make sure every single form that the church uses has a required e-mail field on it. It is just as important to capture an e-mail address as it is a phone number or a physical address.
5. Use a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace to promote your e-newsletter. Social networking is such a fast way to meet your friend’s friends that it creates a literal snowball effect if you use it to your advantage. Once you begin collecting friends and followers to your account, start posting teasers or teaching nuggets that are associated with the content of your current e-newsletter and just end the teaser with a link to either the e-newsletter on your website or the place on your website where they can subscribe to receive your e-newsletter. Remember – the people that will be seeing your “posts” on your Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter accounts are more than likely not going to take the time to visit your website. I recently suggested this idea to a client that we developed a website for years ago, and in just a couple of months they have experienced a flood of new subscriptions for their e-newsletter
2. Use Common Sense with the Search Engines.
Many organizations contact us needing help with their placement in the search engines. There are things that your webmaster can do to improve the site so to make your website more “search engine friendly,” but there are, in my opinion, equally if not more important things that you can do to increase traffic to your site and improve your search engine rankings.
What are Search Engines for?
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN are there to serve the consumer by providing the most relevant results based on the search criteria. They are a tool to the consumer, but to website owners & webmasters, they are viewed as a way to become visible to the world without paying for advertising. In order for the search engines to work for you, just use a little common sense by implementing the following:
Optimize Your Website for the Search Engines.
Don’t believe the empty promises from companies that “guarantee” top search results for your website. These promises are empty & more often than not won’t be delivered. While it is possible, there are simply too many algorithms that determine who gets placed where, and it requires a great deal of time, hard work, and money to make this happen. “Optimizing your site” means taking a few minutes to ensure that the title, description, and keywords for each page actually match the content itself for that page. Don’t go overboard on the keywords, either. Anymore than 10 per page (yes, that means your home page, too), and you’re not doing yourself any good.
Get Other Sites to Link to Your Site.
This is one of the most important things you as a website owner or Webmaster can do for your site. How does this work? Well, pretend that you are a search engine. You are trying to provide the most popular and relevant results to the users that inquire information from you. You have the tough task in choosing between two sites (we’ll call them website A and website B) to determine which one would make the top search result. Website A is a professionally designed site, visually appealing, and has great content and some cool free stuff, but no one is linking to it. Website B is not as visually appealing, has pretty good (and similar) content, but has 10 other websites linking to it. The search engines will place website B over website A in the search engines, because they interpret those inbound links to mean that website B is more popular, and therefore more of a relevant search for the consumer than website A.
From my experience, it can take some legwork to get others to link to you since it’s not a real priority to them. You might try thinking of some incentive that you can offer for the link. As a church / ministry, you could develop a section on your website of recommended organizations or businesses that are owned or operated by members of your church and link to them. Or, ask them if they are offering any specials on their services and include a short blurb about them in your next e-newsletter with a coupon for your church members to print out when they receive the next e-newsletter. It may be easier to get other organizations to link to your site if you are already linking to them, but I would definitely recommend that you follow up with them to ensure they put the link on their website as well.
Another effective way is to develop separate websites for the different departments of your church or ministry. If the youth group, children’s department, college ministry, and praise and worship team all have separate websites, that’s four quality sites (that you control) that can be linking to the main church website (and vice versa) while at the same time helping those areas to create their own identity and communication tool for all involved.
Update Your Website Regularly
A huge pet peeve of mine is to return to a website weeks later only to find out that nothing has changed. A website that is not updated regularly tells the visitor that the website exists only to serve the purpose of saying that you have a website, and that no real time or effort has been put into making sure that the site can be used as a valuable tool to anyone. Furthermore, it tells people that visit the site not to return to it.
When you keep an updated website, not only are you telling your website visitors that you are in the business of providing a tool that they may want to use, but you are also telling the search engines that your site is a relevant search for people that enter search criteria that matches your site. When search engines return to crawl a website only to find that it no changes have been made to the content, it will eventually become invisible in the search engines because it has become clear that the site will not provide up to date and relevant information.
Do yourself a favor, and update it at least once every month, especially the home page.
3. Put Your Sermons Online
Give your website visitors a reason to return to the site again and again by updating the site weekly with new audio teaching. Many people that work out of an office listen to music on the Internet through a web browser, and your website could provide hundreds of hours of sound biblical teaching while many of your church members are working Monday through Friday. This is not a difficult process. Some of the software to edit the audio and down sample it for the web in MP3 format is free for a Windows machine and for a Mac.
For Windows computers, check out Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) and for the Mac you could use either Garage Band, which comes with the computer, Soundtrack Pro (as part of Final Cut Studio), or Peak LE (sold separately for $99).
A few examples of having audio online:
2. Heart of the Bay Christian Center (updated weekly)
4. Put an Event Calendar on Your Website
Again, give church members a reason to return to the site by keeping an online event calendar that includes upcoming events, scheduled guest speakers, when local school districts open and close, and/or whatever else you want to put on there.
Many of these calendars are web-based and can be updated with only a web browser and no software, such as the one that we did for Tony Cooke’s ministry on his Itinerary page.
It’s a handy online application that can be used for churches that use a webmaster to control the site, but need the calendar updated quickly and easily without having to wait for “the web guy” to get around to make the updates. It can easily be managed and updated by a church secretary or volunteer that is familiar with using programs like Microsoft Word or Excel.
If you are interested in installing an online calendar like this, please contact us.
Final Thoughts
Some of these suggestions may sound simple to some of you, and it’s quite possible that your ministry has implemented some or all of them. If that’s true, then good for you! I encourage you to continue to search for new ways to expand your influence to reach more people for Christ.
Technology isn’t something that we should resist, but embrace it by using God’s creativity in us as believers to reach people faster and more effectively.
