What if Starbucks Marketed Like a Church? A Parable:
I think I encountered this particular ‘brand’ of Church marketing when I first moved down to the Raleigh burbs of Apex.
It does inspire me to want to ‘reel-off’ a parody of “what if Amazon.com sold books like a Church website?”
Hmmmm …
If you aren’t a regular reader of ChurchMarketingSucks.com, then either you like wandering in the church communications wilderness, or you just haven’t had time to add their RSS feeds to your aggregator … go ahead … I’ll wait.
Now that we’ve taken care of that piece of business, I thought I might bring to your attention their listing of their top 10 posts for 2012. Why? Glad you asked.
As your church &/or charity finalizes your communications strategy for 2013 — assuming your organization plans such things in advance — I thought it might be helpful to create a colorful handout of CMS‘ top 10 list so you could better identify targets for tactical textual content.
Once you’re done downloading this infographic, why not show some love and link on over to Church Marketing Sucks and read the rest of their top 10 posts for 2012 article?
Let’s talk a little about the usability frustrations we put up with in the name of daylight saving time – and see if we can’t cobble together an object lesson for our web design.
Okay, so in my best Andy Rooney imitation:
Why is it we can put a man on the moon, yet somehow we still don’t have a “magical gadget” that with the press of a button, will set ALL of our clocks to daylight saving time.
I’m talking about the remote that will not only set my BetaMax … I mean VCR … I mean TIVO… and the watch, and my microwave oven and even the clock in my car parked outside!
Did I just hear an amen?! Yeah, I thought so … and well we should. 
After all, here’s a list of the clocks I had to reset manually – each employing its own rand of a ‘uniquely creative’ set of time-setting interface operations:
I think that’s it … well not including the batteries on all 6 or 7 smoke alarms.
So what usability can we take away from all this minute-setting of madness? How about doing away with what Frank da Cruz referred to in my networking class back in 1986 as “a wide variety of standards.”
Think about it, the method for setting the time on each of the above devices varied, some greatly from the others, some not-so-much. Either way, if you’re not going to give me a “magical gadget” then at least give me a consistent interface to all the above!
And I think the same applies to our software. From page to page of our programs, are we asking our users to do similar things employing “a wide variety of standards?” If so, imagine the learning curves and barriers to conversion we place in front of them.
My point? Go through your entire site and figure out what’s the same and almost-the-same. Then pick a convenient way to do it – and stick with it – even if some better jQuery gizmo comes out next week.
Your users will thank you.
Last Friday I posed the question “what actually heals a church website?” Now it’s Tuesday and I’d like to talk about this in light of the many excellent comments received.
But first a BIG THANKS to all who participated in this dialog – this was both good and healthy and it is much appreciated.
“The medicine that heals depends on the illness — if you’ve got a spinning gold cross, removing it becomes job #1” – Mickey
It’s such a simple point, yet a very salient one. There are some very obvious maladies that afflict our church websites. When we see them, we should fix them.
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, I prescribe my post entitled:
Even if you do know what I’m talking about, it’s a fun read … don’t worry, we’ll be here when you get back.
“I fixed up my church’s website with WordPress and a user-friendly, inviting design. Within months they’d wrecked the colors, changed pictures of people to pictures of furniture, and otherwise mucked it up.” – Jeremy
Okay, I’m not trying to be a wise-guy here, but I’ve seen this happen all to often. Usually this occurs when an individual has an agenda that it outside the scope of what the church website is trying to accomplish. Two that come to mind are:
Often, I find it’s a combination of the both. My post “Mr. Zeldman meet Mike Boyink, one of ‘The New Samaritans’” comes to mind.
“Even if it has to be black Times New Roman on a stark white background, I’d say job one is relevant content. When, where, what, who, and how, and for good measure, don’t forget why.” – lemon
I’m thinking ‘lemon’ pretty much summed it all up rather nicely with his/her enumeration of the basics that help us avoid the “Seven deadly sins of web writing.”
There are really (at least) two distinct audiences for a church website:
- People not part of your normal congregation, seeking information about your church …
- People in the congregation who want to know what’s on this week …
Since the introduction of this blog back on May 17, 2002 I’ve been preaching the importance of identifying the purpose and personality of your church website – and then aiming all content, controls and/or contrivances at seekers and members alike.
Put another way, “A church website that fails to convey the purpose and personality of the congregation and staff will also fail to bring new members into the door.” – Empty Parking Lot Tabernacle
“Unfortunately I think its a people problem, the site is just a symptom. People need to see it as a communication medium and commit to its use. I’m surprised at how poorly email is used by churches, let alone websites.” – David J
Unfortunately, I think the master of the B2Blog has offered a diagnosis that is as incisive as it it accurate. David accurately points out that unless we understand the work-flow that defines how we:
… then a church website is likely never to get healed no matter what content management system it employs, …
… no matter how much Flash animation the site does or does not have, …
… no matter how many social networks the church-geek API’s into the site.
In short, unless church doesn’t have well defined processes for how to effectively get the right information out to your target audiences, then you’re efforts are like the person Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 as aimlessly batting at the air.
At least that’s my take. What about you?
In case you didn’t know, since 1954 there has been a federal ban on political activity for tax exempt, 501(c)(3) organizations such as charities and churches.
A lesson Atlah World Ministries may be learning the hard way when this past February, pastor James David Manning stood in the pulpit of his little church on 123rd Street in Harlem and denounced Senator Barack Obama as a … well it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that said event soon afterward went viral on YouTube. The result, according to the NY Times, was a formal complaint to the IRS by a watchdog group focused on 501(c)(3) violating rules regarding political activity.
Another example on the other end of the ideological aisle was a case concerning the United Church of Christ (UCC) . Back in 2006 they invited then Senator Barack Obama to its annual Synod in Hartford Connecticut in 2007. And despite the Synod making it clear that this shouldn’t be a campaign event – it none-the-less it got politicized – inspiring yet another investigation by the IRS.
There are other such stories, but my point here is not to aggregate such instances, but rather to remind congregational leaders, web masters, and even Sunday school teachers that they need to take a moment and make sure everyone is aware of the July 28, 2008 memorandum from the Director, Exempt Organizations Examinations, describing how the IRS will analyze political campaign activity issues involving websites of section 501(c)(3) organizations.
In it you’ll see that it’s not just overt acts like the reckless and financially suicidal ‘die by the sword‘ Pulpit Initiative launched by the Alliance Defense Fund, but things that can occur in the normal operation of your church and/or charity website such as:
At least that’s this layperson’s, non-legal, untrained understanding of the IRS Tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations and what they communicate on their websites.
That said, and with my likely ignorance of some aspect of the law in mind, I’ll list below some links to sites that seem smarter than me on this tricky topic:
And from the blogosphere … these thoughts:
Remember, regardless of your political leanings, violating this ban may result in denial or revocation of your organization’s tax-exempt status and the imposition of an excise tax on the amount of money spent on the activity …
… that and the loss of the many freebies and discounts your church currently enjoys with its 501(c)(3) status (think Google Apps for starts).
Just as good fences make good neighbors, strong passwords make secure users. Put another way, if your pastor is using his first name as a login, and his last name as a password, it won’t be long before your website and/or email system begins spewing spam for various online services not usually associated with a church … or worse.
What do I mean by worse? Glad you asked.
All a hacker need do is to figure out the login and password to one privileged account and that’s usually enough for them to then quietly get into the rest of your system and begin discovering sensitive information about your organization and/or its members.
I mean imagine the emotional impact and legal/political ramifications that could arise by the publication of private data and/or identity theft resulting from a system compromised by weak password practices.
Okay I’m freaking out, so now what? Glad you asked.
Here are five things you can teach your users to do in creating and using stronger passwords:
Easier said than done Dean. Yes, I know but …
Unfortunately, getting laypersons and staff to use strong passwords is indeed easier said than done because by their nature, such passwords are harder to remember and guess.
That said, one technique I’ve seen used with success is employing passwords based on easy-to-remember mnemonic phrases such as:
There are also a number of free online services that will generate a strong password if you’re having trouble thinking up one of your own, here are just a few:
Along with that, here’s a link to a rather nice free online service that will rate your password’s strength against a number of the criteria mentioned above and then some:
And if you’re too chicken to tell your church secretary that the name of her prize poodle isn’t going to cut it, just send him a link to this article. I can take it from there.
One of the more painful big money issues facing churches and charities are upcoming energy costs that will consume more funds once allocated to other endeavors; while forcing some locations to have black-out dates to reduce the high cost of heating a facility during off-hours. Not to mention the rising costs to staff and laypersons to drive to said locations during the week.
With such exorbitant expenses in mind, there are many online technologies now available to an ever growing bandwidth-enabled congregations that will allow them to save money by moving mid-week meetings and classes out of bricks-n-mortar places and into the web space.
A good example of this is Screencasting, which the WikiPedia defines as:
“… a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration … recent products support more compact file formats such as Adobe Flash and have more sophisticated editing features allowing changes in sequence, mouse movement, and audio.
Just as a screenshot is a picture of a user’s screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of what a user sees on their monitor.”
However, it is an ‘how-to-screencast’ article I found over at Smashing Magazine that finally got me inspired to post on the topic of remote learning – especially when the author of the article asserts:
“Some companies have made a living creating a sort of “virtual classroom,†allowing members to learn at their own pace when they have the time using video tutorials. The advantages of the classroom setting stem from a one on one experience and the ability of the instructor to show the ideas and theories rather than simply explain them.”
More on how you would apply this in a moment, but first, let’s talk about what we’re screencasting …
Also known as web-conferences, webinars allow groups to conduct live meetings or presentations over the Internet. In a webinar, each participant sits at his or her own computer and is connected to other participants via the internet. This can be either a downloaded application on each of the attendees computers or a web-based application where the attendees will simply enter a URL (website address) to enter the conference.
In some cases, the audio is conveyed over a dial-in phone conference channel, though I’ve heard of cases where small conferences reduce costs by employing Skype for the audio portion – be warned though that such alternatives fall into the perilous category of “you get what you pay for.”
Some companies that offer some moderately priced webcast solutions are (in no particular order):
Some of the above systems also provide easy methods for “hitting the record button” to create screencasts of your webinar … allowing you to present once, but view often anywhere, at any time. That said, make sure you can move such videos off their storage (for which they charge) and onto a plaftform like YouTube.
That said, you may want to employ the tools cited in the Smashing Magazine Article including Snapz Pro X, iShowU, and Screenflow for the Mac or Camtasia Studio 5, CamStudio, Adobe Captivate, and Wink for Windows, or Screencast.com that works on both.
There are also some other high-end webinar solutions that certainly “have it all” but are as a result are more expensive to use are: WebEx, LiveMeeting, Adobe Connect Pro, and Elluminate.
Now start thinking along these lines:
It’s not as expensive as one might think, and compared to the cost of heating an entire building wing to hold a single, 30-minute committee meeting in a single room, it might be a real steal.
(Oh who am I kidding? Who ever heard of a 30-minute church committee meeting? Gad, I crack myself up sometimes!)
There’s also the saving in gas and time realized by not having everyone – especially staff members – come (back) to the church during the evening for such weekday meetings.
With all these cost vs. savings issues cited, I strongly recommend you at least read the advice offered in the Smashing Magazine article entitled ‘Screencasting: How To Start, Tools and Guidelines‘ as a matter of of stewardship.
Those putting off the purchasing and/or long-term renewal of a domain name for their church and/or charity because the price was too high may want to re-think that strategy as it appears that the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry for ‘.org’ domain names, will be raising their annual wholesale price for ‘.org’ domains by 10%.
In a May 1, 2008 communications with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the PIR disclosed the increase that would bring the annual fee to $6.75. Last year, PIR imposed a 2.5 percent fee increase to $6.15. PIR did not cite a reason in its letter – nor does it have to – as the PIR does not need ICANN’s approval for such increases.
What this means for the rest of us buying 1 or 2 domains at the retail level is likely a similar price increase – though it’ll be interesting to see how many domain name registries keep the increase to 10% of their current price, as opposed to marking up a bit more as I suspect some will.
As the Internet’s 6th most popular domain name suffix, it also likely means an increase in renewal for the nearly 7 million domain names already registered as ‘.org” – provided of course one’s domain name service hasn’t beaten you to the punch.
As for me, considering the is now very little price disparity between .com and .org, and taking into consideration the popularity and ease in which others remember the .com suffix, I’m thinking I might put my bucks into a .com domain if I had to choose between the two …
… tough I always STRONGLY recommend that any church and/or charity purchase both .org and .com domain name, for as long a period as they can afford it.
More info about the recent PIR rate increase can be found below: