In the last installment of Communicating (online) for a Change we looked at the relationship of planning a sermon (communicating the Gospel orally) to communicating the same church vision via the internet. This series, drawing wisdom from the book Communicating for a Change by Andy Stanley, is meant to focus our efforts in the realm of online church marketing by giving us a methodology consistent with the same goals that drive our weekly sermons.
The first point titled “Determine your goal” is primarily centered around what kind of actions do we want our visitors to take, or what is the most important impact we want to try to have on them? Often times these are called KPIs in modern project management or Key Performance Indicators. Simply stated, “I/we will consider this project successful if the visitors to our site do _______ or learn about _______.”
So, how do we ensure the success of our goals? By eliminating the noise in our messaging. If our online message is to be successful we need to eliminate the static. How do you like listening to a radio station when there’s static in the background? Or perhaps a better illustration is this: How well can you follow a single conversation from afar off in a crowded room?
In the book, Stanley speaks of the difficulty listeners have in following or retaining information from the traditional outline. If you present a 5 point outline with 3 sub-points in each, how much of that will the average listener retain? Not much, unfortunately. The key, he teaches us, is to pick a point and stick to it. To translate this to the church web site project, it means that basically we should not create so many messages that they all get lost in the shuffle. Have you ever been to a web site that had so many things going on that you couldn’t find the one thing you were looking for? Or, how about the web site where you can’t for the life of you figure out what they do or why they have a web site because there is nothing but fluff in their home page and no clear message? This is what we mean. If your goal is to get people involved in small groups then make your messaging small group centric and save your pastor biographies, blogs, and student ministry announcements for another area of the site. If your primary goal is informing the body of events, then make upcoming events and information on past event success the primary message of your site.
Now, you might be saying “How do I know what we should focus on?” This is something that we often forget to think of in church marketing (aka outreach) efforts. ASK! If you want to know what the most important aspects of a web site are to your visitors or members, ask them! It takes minutes to open up Microsoft Word and crank out a list of questions of what they might like to see. If you already have a functioning web site with a poll feature you can use that. If all you did was ask them “What do you think would be the best feature we could add to our web site: a) small group locater, b) event schedules, c) online learning, b) online giving?” you would instantly have a clear prioritization for your web project. You might even get so sophisticated as to break the responses up by an age demographic or which service the answers were collected at. Then you could see “hrmm… the folks on Wednesday night whose average as is 29.7 are more interested in small groups, but those who come to the first service on Sunday and average of 48 are more interested in online study materials.” This allows you to consider the volume of visitors and how to cater to their needs specifically.
This is a simple section, but the one that most projects get lost on. They create a million and one (give or take) programs online but none of them executed very well. If instead they were to focus their efforts on the one or two things that were most important to the body, they would be able to execute those pieces more effectively and elminate the noise that gets in the way.
Lastly, in order to be effective in how you drive visitors to the information you’ve created to suit the needs they’ve expressed, you must be strategic in how you monitor this success. If you haven’t yet, mosey on over to Google and check out their offerings for analytics and tracking. Sign up for an account and get their code into your site. You need a baseline BEFORE you start your project on who is coming to your site, what they look at, how long they stay, and where do they leave. Get familiar with this now because as you develop your new site you’ll want to graduate to new features like tracking goals and funnel droppoff in order to understand how successful your new site is. This will allow you to adjust your online strategies and marketing efforts to suit the needs of your visitors.
Now go on… cut out the noise. It might feel like you’re doing “too little” by not tackling every single piece of neat-o functionality you can dream up but I promise you, your members will appreciate the reduced clutter and clear message you create. If it doesn’t work, I’ll refund the cost of this article… no questions asked 
Stay tuned for next week’s installment titled “Create a Map” or see past articles in this series below:
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Determine Your Goal - What effect do you want your site to have on the body?
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Pick a Point - Success through targeted messaging
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Create a Map - Failing to plan is planning to fail
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Internalize the Message - Before you can preach it, you have to believe it
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Engage Your Audience – Getting them to your site requires telling them it’s there
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Find Your Voice - Consistency of voice and thoughtful messaging
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Start All Over - Return visits requires fresh content
