Conference Blog

One of the bigger questions floating around the IMC is the issue of online discipleship, or—for that matter—online friendship. Is true discipleship possible without real world interaction?

I would say that true discipleship, friendship and/or community can happen in cyberspace. There’s a sense at this conference (and in the Christian community in general) that our online ministries only exist to connect people in real life. It’s a simplification but it’s almost as if until people meet in real life their online relationship is for naught. It isn’t until they actually meet face to face that the hours you’ve spent bantering, learning and praying for each via online means are validated.

For me, communication is the internet’s strongest assets. For the first time in the history of the world you can distribute information in minutes across borders and continents. We now have the capibility of connecting to individuals worldwide through our ministries, and oftentimes in a much more comfortable format.

I think we should be asking ourselves what parts of ministry could the internet actually do better than face to face communication rather than how do we compliment our physical world ministries.

Alan Ritari (of Agathon Group) presented a workshop this morning about the top ten mistakes Christian websites make. It was a fun and informative session—like everybody else there, I was tallying up how many of the listed mistakes I’ve made over the years (most of them). Here’s a quick rundown of common mistakes:

10. We don’t take it seriously. Building a website is hard work—but in our enthusiasm, we often forget that putting up a good website is more than just slapping some HTML together and calling it done. Lots of problems and challenges will crop up during development that cost time, money, and energy. Planning a website is like planning a trip: you have to have a good road map (strategy) in place before you get started.

9. No site is an island. The best websites are those which are integrated with everything else your organization is doing. Your website shouldn’t be operating on its own, divorced from what the other departments or branches of your ministry do.

8. Building for the board. Most ministries need a board of directors to offer guidance and oversight—but you can’t build a website just to please the board. Remember that your board (and you) are not the audience you are trying to reach with the website. And don’t build a site for “everyone”—the more specifically targeted your message is, the better results you’ll see.

7. Keep it simple, stupid. Resist the urge to throw resources or gizmos up on your website just because you can. A little thought experiment: if your website could be one page, which thing would you put on it? What is really important to your message?

6. Too much world. There’s a fine line between having your finger on the pulse of what the world is doing, and just imitating the world in cheesy fashion. We need to tell our own authentic message on our own terms.

5. Not enough world. The flip side of Mistake #6. Facebook and Twitter are popular for a reason—ask yourself what popular sites like these are tapping into. We need to carefully observe internet trends.

4. Staffing for the technology. The tech geniuses who build your website aren’t necessarily the best choice to oversee that site’s ongoing development and strategy. Sites that are under the stewardship of a marketing or strategy department are often more effective than sites that are entirely under the control of tech staff. Alan summed it up: “A website is not a technical problem.”

3. Sloppy craft. Your website needs to be competently designed and in line with web standards. People will judge your message by the way you present it. The Gospel is a big enough “stumbling block” already—don’t add new and unnecessary stumbling blocks by annoying users with bad web design.

2. Not measuring results. Do you know what you’re trying to achieve with your website? Are you watching how people use your website? You should!

1. We do it on our own strength. Any effort not in line with God’s will is doomed to failure, even if you avoid making all of the other mistakes on this list. If God isn’t calling you to do a ministry website… well, maybe that’s not the most effective thing you could be doing for the Kingdom. Approach the challenge of web design and strategy with the right spiritual attitude.

All good points, and there was some good discussion after Alan’s presentation. And I’m sure Alan would be willing to expand on any of these if you were to grab him at lunch or during a break with a few questions.

I’ve been coming to the Internet Ministry Conference for several years now (even back when it was called Gospelcon, and before that just “the Gospelcom conference”). And if there’s one phrase I’ve heard mentioned repeatedly in workshops in every conference, it’s “user testing.”

I’m sitting in Wiley Stinnett’s “Why do you have a website, anyway?” session, and that phrase keeps coming up—and I’ll wager you’ll hear it from other speakers here over the next few days. It seems clear that user testing is an important part of building an effective online ministry… but it also seems clear that most ministries simply don’t do it.

What about your ministry? Do you do any type of user testing or research? What did it look like? I’m curious:

• Was it a one-time thing, or is it an ongoing process as you develop and maintain your ministry?
• Did you hire an agency to carry out research and report the findings back to you, or did you do the testing/research yourself?
• What type of user testing did you do? An online survey, a focus group? Did you sit your spouse and kids down in front of your website and ask for their opinion?

“User testing” sounds a bit intimidating, especially to a ministry with a tight budget, but if I’ve learned anything about this topic over several years of conferences, it’s that there are many ways to gather research about your users without spending a lot of cash. There’s always some cost involved, whether it’s money or time or effort—but there are a lot of tools and ideas out there that make it easier and cheaper than you might fear.

If you’ve never done any type of user testing or research, now’s a good time to learn more—next time you sit down for lunch or dinner here at the conference, consider asking the people at your table what they’ve done and how it worked. There are several workshops coming up that look relevant to this issue as well—Kent Shaffer’s internet marketing session, tonight’s plenary address on internet ministry best practices, and workshops by Tiffani Barnes and Brian Tol.

I’m hosting David Russell’s session on Making Usable Websites. We needed a vga-dvi adapter to hook up his laptop to the projector, an adapter that the Prince Conference Center was fresh out of.

What to do?

Well, we could have waited until another session was done and hoped they didn’t need the adapter, but we were positive someone at the conference had one. So, David tweeted about it and I started hitting my buddies on gtalk. Within five minutes we had secured the adapter.

When social networking works, it works very well.

I’ve noticed a couple IMC attendees are already blogging about the conference:

• There’s a good rundown of Gabe Lyons’ plenary address last night at ChurchRelevance.

• Indy Christian is blogging from the conference.

If you’re here at the conference and are blogging any of it, let us know—we can send a shout-out to your blog, or set you up to contribute here on the IMC blog if you’d like.

Last night’s plenary address by Gabe Lyons (of the Fermi Project and author of unChristian) was a great kickoff for the conference! Lyons’ book made something of a splash by extensively documenting what young people outside the Christian faith really think about Christians. The results—that Christians are overwhelmingly perceived as antihomosexual, hypocritical, overly political, and out of touch—aren’t flattering, but can’t be ignored.

I expected Lyons’ address last night to rehash the book’s basic premise, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well he applied the book’s thesis to the world of internet ministry. He challenged us to consider what values and ideas our online ministries really project—do they contribute to the world’s negative perception of Christianity, or do they offer a refreshing, authentic alternative? In a sea of information overload, does your online presence simply add to the noise, or offer real answers to the questions people are really asking? Lyons also challenged us to be more deliberate and thoughtful in choosing which tools and technologies (Twitter, Facebook, RSS, etc.) to use in the service of internet ministry.

His address ended with a challenge for Christian ministries to focus on serving the “common good”—to leave behind the narrowly-focused, static types of ministry many of us have grown accustomed to, and to focus instead on building authentic relationships with people. Just as the church in centuries past worked not just to save souls but to make the world better by doing God’s will in it, so we need to expand our idea of what it means to do “ministry.” Sticking a Gospel presentation on your website and hoping people will say that Sinner’s Prayer after randomly stumbling across it isn’t enough; we need to create online environments that radiate grace and love.

There’s much more, but this is already starting to sound like a laundry list of points. You can check out many of Lyons’ ideas in unChristian, but if you missed his talk last night, the best way to hear about his internet ministry ideas is probably just to grab an attendee who heard him speak. All in all, it was a good way to get the conference rolling.

(As a side note: Gospel Communications CEO Gordon Loux also took the stage for a few minutes with some updates about Gospelcom and the Alliance. Details are scarce at the moment, but Loux said he hopes to have some concrete announcements about that in the next few days—so if you’ve got unanswered questions about the Gospelcom Alliance, stick around.)

People are starting to show up to the Internet Ministry Conference. It’s rather exciting to start putting faces to the names I’ve been hearing over the past year. There’s about a 1:1 ratio of laptop to person and lots of little conversations about life, technology and the conference.

Andy Rau and I (Chris Salzman) are attempting to coordinate everybody’s blogging and tweeting efforts. Larry Tomlinson (whom I met through twitter about an hour ago) and I have decided we’re going to use the hashtag #imc2008 on our conference tweets. All you need to do is put the tag in our tweet somewhere. You can check out updates at this page.

As far as blogging is concerned: anybody who is interested in blogging should come find either myself or Andy anytime during this week. Come grab us during dinner or anytime during the conference for more information. We’ll be blogging a few times a day and would love to have you join in on the fun.

Tony Steward has a great post on his blog about twitter and church culture. I really recommend reading it!.

For those who don’t know, Tony is the Online Community Pastor at LifeChurch.tv. He works with their Internet Campus, Life Groups and Second Life Campus. He knows a ton about churches and social networking-definitely a blog worth reading!

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You won’t know how effective your Internet ministry is without looking at the stats for your site. Yeah, I know many people say stats are not accurate and that hits and pageviews are not worth tracking.

It all depends what you are tracking. If all you want to know is how much activity is happening on your server - hits are good. If you are looking for how many pages or parts of pages are being accessed - pageviews are good.

But if you are wondering how many people are visiting your site… well that is where things get a little tricky. Tracking visits, visitors, and unique visitors has improved quite a bit over the last few years. But it is still not perfect, at best it is an educated estimate. (still valuable to look at though)

There are many tools that not only give you all this information but also a ton more (geographic, content specific, search engine and marketing information). Probably one of the best (and it’s free) is Google Analytics. It is amazing what you can do with the information that Google Analytics (GA) collects.

Along with stats, it gives you information on goal conversion as well. If there is a certain thing you are trying to do, you can set up GA to watch how many people accomplish that goal. For example, you have a conference that you want people to register for (Closes August 31, don’t forget : ), GA will track how many people go through that path and either abandon it or sign up.

And it is really easy to set up…

There are tools you can buy like Web Trends or Click Tracks but with such a complete tool - why not tap into it? (Even if you don’t like Google, it’s worth it)