Archives For Church

Your competition isn’t always right

August 26, 2011 — 6 Comments

No matter what line of business you’re in, you can often get inspiration and ideas by checking out your competition.  You can see what kind of stuff they’re putting on their website, how they’re using social media, what new products they’re stocking, etc.  However, you ultimately need to trust yourself.  Here are a few examples.

Using music to set the tone

I was recently talking to a client about her site, and suggested we take the background music off.  After a brief discussion, she agreed.  When I asked why she put it up there in the first place, she said that a lot of her competition did that and she was trying to match them.  Being a brand-new business, emulating some of the established sites is certainly a great idea.  Now that she’s removed the music and they haven’t, she’s a step ahead!

Facebook “welcome tabs”

I have a lot of clients asking for “welcome tabs” on their Facebook Page.  While it’s certainly appropriate in a few situations, it seems that most people are doing it simply because everyone else is doing it, and no one is really thinking it through.  Most users come to your Facebook page for the content — information, specials, etc.  Why put an extra page in their way?

It feels a lot to me like the “splash pages” everyone had in the late 90′s — simply an unnecessary step between your user and the content they want.  We all eventually realized how stupid those were, so how are Facebook welcome tabs any different? (Honestly — leave a comment and convince me how they’re a good thing for everyone.  I’m certainly open to changing my mind if someone can supply a solid argument.)

Copying the church down the road

One church I worked at was obsessed with the other big church just down the road.  We’d often spend thousands of dollars copying activities that they did, even if we didn’t need them.  It was quite sad.  There were essentially two ways that our leadership viewed things:

  • If they’re doing x, and we’re not, we need to start.
  • If we’re doing x, and they’re not, we need to stop wasting time on it.

This was especially problematic during the rise of social media, because the “other church” was slow to adopt it.  Therefore, it was tough for us to convince our church leadership that it was worthwhile.  The “other church” is a wonderful place, but they have made some very poor technological choices over the past few years; very dumb things with their website, very little social media, etc.  Copying them in those areas would have been a foolish mistake.

Stylish restaurant websites

Have you ever tried to pull up a restaurant website on your phone?  It’s almost always brutal.  Slate recently had an article about this, and I agree completely.  Not only are they often unusable on a phone (especially an Apple device, with no hope of loading their cute Flash menus), but they’re equally frustrating from a normal browser.

My thought is that it’s the restaurant owners and their desire for a particular ambience that cause most of the issues.  While you certainly want the actual restaurant to have that feel, putting cheesy background music being a painfully “creative” navigation bar isn’t the way to do it on the website.

The University website

(via xkcd.  awesome site)

Part of this comes back to the problem of the University website.  Universities think that we want to read about the school’s philosophy and press releases, and that idea is validated by other universities posting the same junk on their home page.  This is very similar to churches that post a big link to their denomination’s website, rather than providing decent driving directions.

Check them out, but be smart

I’m certainly not saying you shouldn’t see what your competition is doing.  As I said at the beginning, you can often get some good ideas from them.  Just be smart, and always view things through the eyes of your customers.  Ask yourself, “if I was a customer, why would I visit the site and what would I be looking for?”  If the answer is “cheesy music and a mission statement”, find someone to help you think through it a bit further. :)

In Church, Companies, Facebook, Marketing, Mobile, Site Content, Social Media , , , , , , ,
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Why are churches so far behind?

February 16, 2011 — 2 Comments

I was recently asked a question, based on this chart:

If [that chart] is true, then why are churches so far behind in web site design and social media adoption?

Here’s a few thoughts.

They’re not all behind…

Simply in the Atlanta area we have amazing churches like North Point,  with Andy Stanley (@AndyStanley) and his 70,000 followers, that put out an excellent video on YouTube that has nearly 3,000,000 views.  Even the pastor of our comparably smaller church (@IkeReighard) has nearly 2,500 followers and has tweeted over 4,000 times.  Some churches really get it, so we don’t need to paint all churches as being behind.

…but many are

That being said, many churches are certainly behind the curve when it comes to web design and social media.  I won’t name names here, though. :)

Why?

Some possible reasons

  • They’re scared. They hear scary stories about social media and decide to avoid the conflict.  Of course, conversations about their church will happen whether they’re involved or not (like James B. Nutter), so they need to be out there and join the conversation.
  • They don’t have enough money. They get a quote for a new website and can’t bear the thought of a $10,000 redesign, so they scrap the whole idea.  However, most churches would do quite well to simply install WordPress (in just 10 minutes) and go from there.  The cost, aside from a few $$/month for hosting, is nothing.
  • They consider it a separate area. Does your church have a “director of phone ministries”?  How about a “director of brochure mailings”?  No?  Of course not!  Yet most churches consider social media to be a distinct area of communication, rather than embedding it throughout the staff.  Your minister could be tweeting thoughts and ideas, your Children’s Director could be posting more on their Facebook Page, and your Men’s Ministry could start a group on LinkedIn for all of the businessmen in the church.  Referring to a particular staff member as “the social media person” means that you don’t get it.  You certainly should have someone oversee the effort and make sure you’re putting forth a consistent message, but everyone needs to be involved.
  • They don’t have enough time. I hear this one the most often — “I just don’t have time”.  Perhaps this explains why most churches ignore people on Twitter.  Of course, if you really want to connect with your community, you need to go where they are.  In Cobb County, Georgia (where I live), it’s estimated that residents spend roughly 1.5 million hours per week on Facebook.  You don’t have time to connect with them?  Really?

What do you think?

Do you feel that churches are falling behind?  If so, why?

In Church, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter , , , , , ,
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More on churches and Twitter

December 18, 2010 — Leave a comment

Last month, I wrote a post about churches not responding well on Twitter and it got a nice response.  I followed it up with a guest post over on Church Marketing Sucks and it got even more feedback.

CMS has now written a follow-up post where they interview Justin Wise to get his thoughts on all of this.  His main thought were:

  • Churches aren’t intentionally ignoring people on Twitter.
  • They don’t have a solid strategy in place.
  • They don’t know what tools to use.
  • They think it takes too much time.

His responses were well thought-out and I agree with what he had to say.  Be sure to check out the full article to see all of his responses.  If you’re a church, you should strongly consider exploring and implementing some of his ideas.

In Church, Social Media, Twitter , ,
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More churches are on Twitter, but are they listening?

November 1, 2010 — 28 Comments

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, more and more churches are hopping onto Twitter and it’s becoming quite common to see the blue [T] icon in the corner of church home pages.  But with all of those churches on Twitter, are they really listening? Or are they treating it as simply another way to push information out to people?

There’s only one good way to find out for sure — test them!  I searched for churches in the Atlanta area that met two simple criteria:

  • I didn’t include any churches that I work with. I consult with a handful of area churches on their website and/or social media, so I excluded those.
  • They had to have a link to their Twitter account on their home page. I know a lot of churches have probably dabbled with Twitter a bit, but I figure if you’re going to put a link to it on your home page, you’re probably pretty serious about it.

With that in mind, I found 11 churches in the Atlanta area that fit the bill.  All had tweeted at some point in the past month, and most had tweeted within the last day or two.

The Test

I have a handful of Twitter accounts that I’ve used for various things over the years (old websites, testing, etc), so I used a different account for each church so that they wouldn’t see the same message posted to 10 other churches.  The message was simply:

@ChurchName What time are your services this Sunday?

I posted it around 2:20pm on Thursday, giving them plenty of time to respond before the Sunday services. Easy enough.  If they’re paying attention, it’ll take them about 10 seconds to respond.  So were they listening?

The Results

There were a few categories of results.

First, you had the churches that failed to reply, and in fact never even tweeted in the few days since I tried to reach them:

Next, you had the churches that failed to reply, even though they posted a few times since I tried to reach them:

Next, you had the churches that failed to reply, even though they posted a few times since I tried to reach them and there were multiple tweets which mentioned them that they failed to respond to:

Finally, we have our one winner.  It’s shocking and pathetic that only one out of eleven churches even bothered to reply, but they did a great job:

Roughly two hours after I sent the tweet, I received an excellent response from them:

@CelebNewsNet This Sunday we’ll have service at 9:00, 10:30 am, & 5:00 pm. You can even watch live online at http://apostles.org.

Not only did they reply promptly and with accurate information, they told me how I could watch online.  Excellent job!

Conclusion

So there you have it.  Pretty pitiful, huh?  Remember, these weren’t just any churches; they were churches that were actively promoting their Twitter account on their home page.

Resolving this isn’t too difficult.  I’m guessing most of those churches didn’t intentionally ignore my tweet; they simply never saw it.  There are hundreds of ways you can track this kind of thing, but here are a few to get you started:

  • Tweetdeck: Keep it running on your system all the time.  You can follow people you want to watch, add your Facebook stream, etc, but you can also view your mentions.  That’s key, and it’s built-it.
  • Social Oomph: If you don’t have screen space or enough memory to run Tweetdeck 24/7, then sign up for a service like Social Oomph.  They’ll send you a daily report when someone mentions your account (or even simply your church name) so you’ll know you need to log on and respond.

What about your church? If a tweet like this came your way, would you see it?

In Church, Social Media, Twitter , ,
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Church Website Review: Alamo UMC

October 7, 2010 — Leave a comment

Cheryl recently contacted me and asked me to take a look at her site.

Alamo UMC – www.gbgm-umc.org/Alamo

I’m not a big fan of the gbgm-umc sites.  While I certainly appreciate what they do (free web space for churches — it’s a great ministry), most churches should no longer be on there.  Many have a hard time staying under the 10MB limit, and you also have to deal with the horrible site URL.  Imagine telling someone your URL in person:

It’s g-b-g-m-dash-u-m-c-dot-org-slash-alamo.  No, no, g-b-G-m. Right. No, that’s a dash, not a slash. No, that one is a slash. Ugh. Got it?

Cost used to be a major factor, but those days are over. You can get hosting from HostGator for $4.95 a month, and domain costs $10 year.  All told, that’s less than $6/month.  Your church can’t afford that?  Really?

Anyhow, as part of the review I brought up a few previous posts:

On to the review. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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More clicks = better rankings in Google?

September 19, 2010 — Leave a comment

I was talking to @jasonbhuffman on Twitter about search engine optimization on his church site, and he told me this:

I was informed that on Google, more clicks on a particular site would cause it to be listed higher in certain searches.

Google won’t confirm or deny whether or not clicks can help, so know one knows for sure, but most experts agree with the following:

  • Clicks from Google search result pages possibly help. If you come up fourth for a particular phrase, yet more people click your result than the third listing, it seems there’s a chance you could move up.
  • Clicks from other pages (like Twitter) to your site are unlikely to help. While Google can often see clicks from other sites via the Google toolbar or Google Analytics installed on your site, it doesn’t appear to have an effect on your rankings at this point.

Of course, clicks from sites like Twitter are still certainly excellent, since they’re visitors!  Even if it doesn’t have a secondary benefit, you’re still getting someone on your site, which is the entire goal.

So what can be done?

Jason’s site is First UMC Palestine, so I thought I’d offer a few other on-site SEO tips that might help.  There are really two things that we need to focus on:

  1. Make sure that Google is aware that the church is located in Palestine, TX, so they can rank well when people refine their search to that area (like “churches in palestine tx”).
  2. Make sure pages focus on their primary content, so Google will know when to show those pages.  As a result, we want to rank well when people search for specific things in the area, like “palestine preschool” or “vbs in palestine”.

So, here’s a few things that should help:

  • First, clean up the page titles.  The title on the home page is incredibly long, and titles on the internal pages are missing some nice keywords.
  • Add more internal links. For example, the list of worship services on the left side of the home page should link to details about those searches.  Use the main text on each page to link to other relevant pages, but do it naturally.  If you mention the preschool, link to that page, but don’t try to force extra links in there.
  • Build separate pages for each staff member, with the full list of them on the main “staff” page.
  • Avoid saying “click here”, which I noticed in a few places.  Link the relevant text every time.
  • Keep posting great blog entries.  Each of those have the potential to pull in some visitors from Google, especially if we can get the page titles cleaned up so that each one has more of a “palestine” pull to it.
  • Remove the link to the “Arras Theme” in the footer.  They allow you to remove it, but I agree that you should give them a small donation in exchange for it ($10?). Here’s why that will help.
  • Get more links pointed to your site.  Our link at the top of this article will help, but now you need a bunch more as well.  Get church members to add a link from their personal blogs, see if any Palestine-centric sites (Chamber of Commerce, etc) will link to you.  Any inbound link will help.

Over time, those should help you rank better.  You don’t appear to have Google Analytics installed, so I hope you have some way of accurately tracking your traffic to see how things change and improve.

In Analytics, Church, SEO , , , , , ,
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You’ve gotta give before you can get

September 16, 2010 — 1 Comment

It’s a idea we’ve all heard before: You’ve gotta give before you can get.  Churches often apply it to tithing, many apply to social networking sites like Twitter, but it also applies in a few other areas.

Think back to the move “Miracle on 34th Street”.  Kris Kringle was directing shoppers to competing stores when Macy’s didn’t have their desired toy in stock.  Management was initially furious, but the result was that customers greatly appreciated that Macy’s was really looking out for them, and become even more devoted to the store.

Here’s a clip from the movie that shows that.  The audio isn’t synced correctly, but you should be able to follow along:

Ministers

The same is true of ministers.  I’ve attended a handful of churches in the past decade and found a variety of styles from the ministers.  Some were great friends with neighboring churches, some were like mortal enemies.  Here are two quotes from senior ministers at two different churches, upon finding out that a high school student was attending a program at a different church in the area:

A: “That’s great! I hadn’t seem him in church lately and was getting worried. I’m glad to see he’s plugged in somewhere!”

B: “Why are they going over there?  We need to duplicate that program and try to lure them back!”

In the case of the second church, they spent thousands of dollars on a new program to directly compete with another church just a half mile away.  The program died shortly after.

At our church, the Lead Pastor makes it clear that his primary concern is for the well-being of church members; whether or not they attend our church is completely up to them.

Recently, when discussing the upcoming “Baptism Sunday” that was approaching, he showed a clip of a recent baptism at another church in the area.  It was a powerful clip, and it made that other church look very good.  More importantly, it made the church (as a whole) look good.  The clip was a powerful reminder of the importance of baptism, and the fact that it was promoting another church was meaningless.  Even so, many pastors avoid showing this kind of content during their service, for fear that it’ll make people want to attend the other church instead.

Here’s the clip, if you’re curious:

Websites

The same holds true to websites.  Some sites are afraid to link out to anyone, for fear of losing that visitor.  In fact, the opposite is true; by withholding valuable resources, visitors will be less likely to return to your site at all!

For example, on Google Earth Blog, virtually every post is a story with a link to another site.  I try to find the best information for the readers of the site, and direct them to it.  By always providing useful information, it’s become a very reputable resource for Google Earth news.  The same is try for sites of every genre; the biggest sites are the ones that freely link to the best resources.

Church Websites

So how does this apply to your church website?  That’s up to you.  The main thing is to simply give your users the best possible information, even if it’s not yours. You can do little things, like linking to the website of an upcoming musical or preaching guest.

You could take it even further and link to other churches in your area.  Oak Haven UMC actually has a page on their site that lists other churches in their community, so you can make an informed decision and choose the church that is best for you.

What are some other ways you could use your church website to give more to your users?

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Church Website Review: Centenary UMC and Roberts Chapel UMC

September 13, 2010 — Leave a comment

Bob contacted me and asked me to take a look at a few church sites that he’s built.

Centenary UMC — www.centenarylex.com
Roberts Chapel UMC — www.robertschapelumc.org

Centenary is a fairly large church, while Roberts Chapel is quite a bit smaller.  I’ve combined them into a single review, which is posted below.

Toward the beginning, I mention a few items that you can learn more about: Canonicalization and better page titles.  Check out those links and then watch the full review below.

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Church Website Review: Magnolia Creek Baptist Church

September 10, 2010 — 2 Comments

I didn’t plan on doing this many reviews this week, but I found another site that I thought would be good to look at (and another one coming soon as well)

Magnolia Creek Baptist Church — www.magnoliacreek.org

I found this one via Twitter yesterday when their worship leader, Jud Kossum, tweeted about it.

Before we get to the video, a few quick reference links that you’ll notice I mention during the review:

With that said, on to the review.  As always, leave your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.

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Church Website Review: Journey Church

September 9, 2010 — Leave a comment

I saw a tweet from PLAYCreative today that simply said:

We just launched a website for a our client Journey Church from Peoria AZ! Check it out www.lifeisajourney.org

So naturally, I took a look.  I look at quite a few new church sites each day, but this one was quite impressive.  It was apparent that it was well thought out, and I felt it was worth sharing with all of you.

Journey Church – www.lifeisajourney.org

Like many sites, I thought their page titles were pretty weak.  Beyond that, though, it was a great site!  Watch the review below, and feel free to leave additional comments.

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