The new front door--your web site

There's a whole host of home decor shows that focus on first impressions. One in particular often includes a front door makeover.

Web sites have become, in many ways, the new front door for the church. In the last decade or so, do-it-yourself publishing has enabled churches of any size to have their own presence on the web.

So what does your front door say about your church? Does it have curb appeal?

First, let's break this into a couple of segments. Today we'll focus on how people find you.

If you aren't tracking visits to your site and search engine rankings, it's difficult to have a good picture of whether your site is working for you. There are some web sites that offer free visit tracking, with surprising detail, including how long a unique visitor stayed on the site, how many pages were viewed, what page was viewed last and the general location of your visitors.

To see how you're doing in search engines, you can also download software or you can do it manually by periodically entering search terms in a search engine. The dominant search engine is Google, which offers a free alert system that will send you emails as frequently as you prefer to show you where and how often your church name is appearing on the web. Since most people looking for a church home are more likely to search in general terms than for your church name, it's wise to track search results as well for terms such as "churches in Lexington, KY" or "Disciples of Christ churches in Lexington." You can do this manually once a week, which should be sufficient for you to know how your church is doing in these general searches.

If you haven't already, it is important to make yourself more visible by entering search tags into your html code. Tracking Google search results for your area will help you see what search tags are working best. If you don't know how to do this, check your instruction guide for the web publishing software you're using, or do a search. It's fairly easy, even for novices, and can make all the difference.

Church...marketing?

Often in making decisions about how to best use the resources of time, talent and offerings, churches are hesitant to "advertise," opting instead to rely on word-of-mouth marketing to grow membership. It's true that most people visit a church for the first time because someone invited them personally, but as one minister friend pointed out, it may be because that is the most commonly used method.

On the other hand, a growing number of churches are wholeheartedly embracing the idea of marketing. They have "branded" themselves at every opportunity and seek to set themselves apart in dramatic ways. (One local minister was introduced to the church by rappelling from the rafters of the stadium-sized sanctuary.) Some are even hesitant to use the word "church." Down the road from my house is a "worship center." A mile from that is a "life center." Worship services are multimedia experiences, both internally and externally through highly produced television programs.

Although my religious leanings are more traditional, I think there's something to be learned from both ends of the spectrum.

* First, we shouldn't shy away from being bold about proclaiming who we are--and, more importantly, whose we are. When I first mentioned marketing the church of which I'm a member, one person told me he was a little uncomfortable with that term, and he was also uncomfortable with the idea of "advertising" the church.

A common mistake is not seeing that, in many ways, church marketing is evangelism. Christ commands us to "go to all the world and teach the Gospel." We can't effectively shout it from the mountaintops, although you're welcome to try. Shouldn't we use the best means possible to spread the Good Word?

* Beyond marketing, I prefer to think in terms of church communication. Just as evangelism does not stop when a person visits the church, the need for effective communication also continues throughout the life of the church.

You can carry out this communication on as grand a scale as your budget will allow, but many churches--especially those most desperately in need of a communications plan--have relatively few dollars to devote to this cause. That means planning, prioritizing and careful implementation to make sure every resource committed to church communication is used as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Here we'll explore what you can do in your own congregation to reach both prospective members, current members and the community at large.