Congregational Mission: rockin’
I posted an email to our congregation on our new church website. We’ve got exciting things going on in Holdrege! Oh, by the way, did I mention that the ELCA Worshipping Community of Holdrege has a new website? And, by the way, there’s a new community and children’s event getting started on October 12. It’s [...]
ELCA Congregational Email Turnaround
There is nothing more frustrating than asking a question and not getting an answer. Timely communication is critical in the business world, and it’s critical in the church world too. Churches seem to recognize this: as I noted in part 5 of this series, over 95% of congregations posted email contact information on their website. [...]
Advanced Content on ELCA Websites
There are plenty of things that churches can do to make their websites more appealing to visitors and members. I was curious to find out how common some of these “advanced content” ideas were. These things aren’t advanced because they require advanced technology; instead, they are just “above and beyond” a simple brochure-style website.
Basic Content on ELCA Websites
In evaluating 101 websites, I had to pick qualities that were directly connected to website effectiveness, yet for time’s sake were easy to check. The simplest of these were the no-brainers, what I’m calling “Basic Content.” This is the stuff you’d expect to find in any tri-fold brochure, if your church still does that sort [...]
Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
It would have been nice if all 101 websites I had sampled would have been beautiful examples of working technology. Sadly, as I mentioned before the weak and sick URLs had to be culled out of the herd. Of the 101 websites, 84 were working. The 17 that were excluded fell victim to:
Choosing a Sampling Strategy
Special thanks to Dr. Marty Smith, a Senior Research Analyst at ELCA Research and Evaluation. His help was invaluable in deciding on a sampling strategy and collecting the congregational demographic data, and I really appreciated his help all the way through this phase of the project. As I discussed in the last article, I needed [...]
Choosing the Demographic Data
One of the advantages of being part of a large congregation is that it’s easy to gather good statistics for this kind of research. The ELCA is a large, nationwide denomination with over 10,000 congregations, and with that kind of size comes a great deal of complexity. I identified the two biggest factors as being [...]
Introduction to Congregational Website Study
For years, I’ve been telling people that good church website design will directly translate into more visitors coming in the door. Anecdotal evidence from my work with several different congregations as their webmaster has borne this out. After taking over decrepit old designs and replacing them with dynamic, well-designed sites, my pastors reported to me [...]
Website Picks on “Pretty Good Lutherans”
Susan at Pretty Good Lutherans has a nice little list of some good ELCA websites. Unfortunately, it’s buried in the sidebar way down the page. But it’s worth clicking through and having a look at some of the sites. These aren’t perfect – for example, the SE Pennsylvania Synod’s domain name is “MinistryLink.org,” which isn’t [...]
New church website launched!
Our congregation in Dubuque, Lord of Life Lutheran Church, has launched a new website! I, along with those in the Lord of Life Website Task Force, are proud of the result and happy to announce it to the world. With the switching on of the new website, our email and calendaring infrastructure now is running [...]