Part of having an entrepreneurial spirit in your work is to constantly look at the edge and figuring out where you can experiment and try out new things.

But this comes with a price that frankly is the limiting factor for a lot of ministries.  This stops all innovating at any level.

Are you leading your teams in a way that instills fear of failure?

Seth Godin reminds us well:

Just about anything worth doing is worth doing better, which means, of course, that (at least at first) there will be failure. That’s not a problem (in the long run), it’s merely a step along the way.

Is fear so ingrained into your team culture that you’ve stop looking for new perspectives in your work?  Are you stuck in a rut because you’re not willing to, well…..fail?

Seth’s Blog: Worst One Ever

I was at a Digital Church & Theology Conference recently and it turned out to be an intimate setting because of bad weather that day, but also because it was a small gathering to begin with at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

One odd thing about a conference on digital church was that there was no video stream or other mechanism to let people in other cities to participate or follow along.  So I quickly lit up a Google+ Hangout session and tweeted out a couple of times with a link to the Hangout.  Sure enough, a bunch of people jumped in immediately and we had a great discussion.

Cool part? One of the speaker, Eugene Cho from Quest Church on the left coast came by and chatted for a but during one of the breaks.  Direct access to a speaker that the conference participants in the room didn’t really take advantage of…

A simple browser experience extended the teaching and community discussion with people outside of the conference in a New York Minute

Hangouts if you aren’t familiar with yet, is the Killer Feature of Google+.  While you can debate back and forth about the rest of Google Plus’s platform, everyone agrees that the multi-user video conferencing feature on Google+ is awesome.

I Google+ Hangout with my daughter everyday.  We hangout (on my 2nd monitor) while she does her homework.  We don’t actively talk all the time, but it is a form of presence that really has helped us connect daily so that we’re already caught up before I even step foot in the door in the evening after work.

When I G+ Hangout with my daughter, it’s much like going to the library with a bunch of friends back in school.  Everyone does their own work, and sometimes you’ll engage in chit chat or catch-up for a minute or two break —  but overall the shared experience allows for casual interaction and builds the relationship.

Churches can take advantage of this multi-user video conferencing technology too.  Here’s a list to get you thinking:

5 ways your church can start using Google Plus Hangouts to build community

1. Live-Stream your Sunday Worship Experiences. It’s not the same as Church Online that might be considered live worship, but letting others peek into church and see what it is like allows both visitors and regular attendees to connect even if they aren’t there on location. This is obviously a huge thing for potential new visitors. For current attendees and members, it offers a way to stay connected while traveling, sick or if they are temporarily not able to come to church. If you use the “On Air” feature, Google+ automatically records the session and publishes it to your YouTube channel. Now you have on-demand playback of your worship services in case someone wanted to hear the sermon again or check out what your church experiences are like over a period of time

2. Small Groups / Bible Study - How about a 6am mid-week group for those that want to study together or pray together before heading out to work or the rest of the day?  Imagine being able to offer this opportunity to connect with each other during the week for encouragement, accountability and just plain old relationship building?  What about an after school session or two for your youth groups?  They’re already on social networks while/after homework.  Wouldn’t it be great to have them connect with other like-minded Christ-followers as well as their non-church going friends at school?  Providing additional ways to connect with your youth leaders and other students at church is now practical and relevant to them with this format.

3. Open Office Hours – Let’s face it, while you think about church and work at church all the time, your people don’t.  Getting to the church building is tough sometimes.  And running around to meet everyone can be difficult to orchestrate and just simply time-consuming, especially for lots of things that aren’t “huge” issues.  What if you held open office hours online where anyone can find you online to video chat, or find you and then hop on the phone for a private conversation?  What if your pastor as well as various other staff/departments did the same thing for your volunteers?  For your congregation?

4. Large Group Teaching or Q&A Sessions — Your sermons are great, but people have questions.  While it isn’t practical to answer them from the pulpit, how about a way to address people’s curiosity or questions that your Sunday messages bring up?  Hosting a public Q&A would serve and reward those that are engaged with the Bible and your Sunday messages.  Instead of teaching your people to ignore their questions or not to follow-up with issues that arise from what they encounter, Google+ Hangouts can promote discussion and a culture of engagement with the Bible.  You could also use Hangouts to do short teaching messages that are not appropriate for Sunday mornings — share focused teaching with small group leaders, preach/teach to different audiences (Youth!? Women? Men?) with more depth and relevance.

5. Worship (music) *with* community interaction – Google+ Hangouts offer a “Studio” kit that allows for higher quality audio to be streamed online.  Your worship band would probably love to opportunity to lead your community (great invitational opportunity too!) in worship together in an *interactive* format!  I haven’t met a worship leader yet that wouldn’t love more interaction and response from the community for which they play music in front of each week.  How about a one-time event to start?  We’ve had music Hangouts where the format it song-testimonial-song-testimonial-song, etc.

There are tons of other ways you can use live mulit-user video conferencing in your ministry setting.  These are just the tip of the iceberg.  In fact, if you have any other ways you think G+ Hangouts might be fruitful to use for church, please share them below!

QR Codes are a lot like Duke basketball. . . Either you love ‘em or hate ‘em, there’s nothing in between.  

And if you consider QR Codes in the church — that only ups the level of passion for either side too.

There are a bunch of ways churches can use QR codes in their church communictions.

But here’s one great example of a church using QR codes for good that I spotted recently.  This ministry posts one at the entrances so that people coming in can quickly scan and access the bulletin on their smartphone by the time they sit down.  That’s practical, helpful and eco-friendly.

Do you think church communications teams are wasting their time with QR codes?

Check out the fan celebration video published to this group’s YouTube channel:

So, who are these girls?

Sonia and Janice are Australian-born Korean twins who sing and post their cover performances on YouTube.   Their musical vids have gotten decent traction on YouTube.  Here’s an obligatory / I’m-lovin’-it example of their work:

And boy can they sing — over 1,000,000 people have subscribed to their channel that has only 38 videos so far.   Many of those videos have MILLIONS of views.  As much as over 20,000,000 views for a single video.

Wow.  So what’s the secret sauce to accruing so many subscribers?

See how the *directly* and *explicitly* engage with their fans on camera?  That’s a huge part of why they’ve gotten so much traction.

Take note: When they’re looking into the camera, they are talking to *you* — an individual — not the anonymous masses of fans that might be watching.  Even though this is a mass medium of communications, when you talk directly to the viewer (singular, not plural!), then you really have the chance to accomplish something — that’s make a connection.

Do you see the difference between broadcasting a generic message and delivering a personal message?  That’s how you do it.

Tell me what is keeping you from creating content like this where you are talking directly at the person watching?  I’d love to hear why your circumstances / brand / approach limits you from doing that.

One of the easiest tactics almost any church can utilize to spread the word about Easter Sunday services is Facebook advertising.

Not only is it affordable since you actually set the bid and budget caps for your campaign — so your expenses won’t go wild and out of control.

But Facebook advertising is extremely effective in reaching friends of those that are attending your church already.  This is where leveraging social networks for church outreach messaging is perfect.

FACEBOOK ADVERTISING ALLOWS YOU TO TARGET VERY SPECIFIC DEMOGRAPHIC GROUPS

Here is an example of an ad I set-up today for Liquid Church’s Easter Services.  You’ll see that I’ve been able to set-up 3 demographic factors — People who live in the US, live in NJ in particular and who are 18 years or older.

The interesting part is that you have even more control of who sees your ad — I added two additional parameters to this Facebook ad campaign:

1. People who are NOT already connected to Liquid Church’s Facebook page.  I am setting up separate messaging (ad graphics, headline, ad copy and click through URL landing page) for people who are already fans of our Facebook page.  This ad is for people who have not LIKEd our Facebook page already.
2. Only people who have friends that are connected to Liquid Church’s Facebook page.  So, here I’m not just targeting anyone in NJ over 18 that’s not part of our FB page community.  This parameter adds the social element.  Our ad will show up ONLY if they have a friend that has already LIKEd our church Facebook page.

By adding these two filters, I can leverage the fact that anyone seeing this ad has a chance of already hearing about Liquid Church from their friend (or their friend’s FB timeline feed) or at least has someone they know that knows about Liquid Church (because they’ve already liked our page).  

In a way, this ad is helping to seed the “invite a friend” behavior we hope our own community members are going to carry out over the next week or so.

FACEBOOK ADS ALLOW YOU TO TALK DIFFERENTLY TO YOUR OWN COMMUNITY MEMBERS

If you’re following along, you’ll now understand that your ads for your current attendees (we can assume these are basically the people who “LIKE” your Facebook page) can be a bit different.

In fact, here is an ad set-up that is intended for people who already know about Liquid Church and is a part of our Facebook community today:

Instead of a generic “come to Easter services” type messaging, we have the ability to help equip our own people to invite their friends and family.  This can be done by sending click throughs to a page on your website that has downloadable content to share with their friends.  What would you put there?  Things like:

• Video invitation from pastor with social sharing or forward to a friend email link
• Facebook cover image people can use for the week
• 1-step tweet links like this one: http://bit.ly/clicktotweetabouteaster2013 (TRY IT!)
• Social sharing friendly videos about Easter like this one called social media Easter

Are you using Facebook Advertising for Easter promotion?  What questions do you have about using Facebook Ads for church?

5 Tips for Churches on Facebook

A little more than 2 years ago we started the Online Church Facebook page (http://facebook.com/cbconline) with little direction or strategy.   Despite our lack of a plan, and through a constant state of experimentation the page has grown to more than 250,000 Likes.  In the process we have made many mistakes, but have also found some keys to success in using Facebook.  Here are a few tips that I believe will help your church maximize Facebook:

• Be Consistent – the biggest mistake that churches make is creating a page and rarely posting to it.  Set a schedule and stick to it, I recommend posting at least once a day.

• Inspire your Audience – inspiring your congregation doesn’t have to just happen in your church building.  It can happen online as well!

• Ask Questions – remember that Social Media is social and asking questions is the best way to start a conversation.

• Tell Stories – there’s not much more powerful than sharing a testimony of how God has moved in the life of someone in your congregation or sharing a highlight from a recent event in your church.

• Share Information – while this is last on the list it is still important to let your congregation know what’s going on.  This is often the only content that churches post and causes their pages to be irrelevant and ignored, nonetheless it is very important

Which of these 5 ways of engaging your community on Facebook is missing from your current routine?

Have you ever considered it was because the user experience was lacking?

What if you reinvented the *experience* you are delivering along with your core offering? Most likely, you haven’t paid as much attention to the “post-sale” experience as you do to the crafting of the core offering to your audience targets.

Check out these fast food reinventions of the user experience:

When seeing these new environments, i was impressed. They woke up and realized they needed to consider the people they depend upon — their customers.

If McDonald’s and KFC can pay attention to the experience they offer and really consider how the customer engages with their brand, can’t you too?

What can you do to really ramp up the experience interacting with your organization?

If your nonprofit or church has a YouTube page, you are part of the rare breed of content creators.   But that’s not enough.  With 70 HOURS of video uploaded every single MINUTE, your audience needs your help.  The 90% — content consumers — are looking for content curators to help them sort through the millions of hours of video available today.

One way to do this on YouTube is via Playlists.

Instead of being presented with a random smattering of videos in your account (by upload date), your audience gets the chance to find sequences of videos that make sense and are related to each other.  The end result is better engagement with your content because they can go deeper, or discover new categories of video content that you offer.

YouTube’s playlist feature allows you to highlight sermon series, topical sets of videos, and more.  Here’s a glimpse at how to set a playlist up in YouTube according to their own help pages:

Set up a YouTube Playlist from the video watch page:

1. Click the Add to button under the video you’re watching.
2. From the drop down menu, type in the name of your new playlist and click the Create playlist button.
3. You can choose if you want your playlist to be public (viewable by others) or private (only viewable by you).

From Video Manager:

1. Sign into your account and click on your username in the upper right corner of your screen. Click on Video Manager in the expanded menu.
2. Click on the Playlists tab on the left side of the screen.
3. Click the +New Playlist button and enter in a Playlist title and description.
4. Click Create Playlist.

Adding to an existing playlist:

1. Click the arrow next to the Add to button under the video you’re watching.
2. From the drop down menu, select the Playlist you want to add your video to.

Do you have playlists set-up on your YouTube channel?  Please feel free to list the link to your YouTube channel here so others can see some examples in action!

If you are around, please consider joining the conversation as we talk about faith, tech and our work. Or follow the conversation with #THCLive

G+ hangout: www.thehighcalling.org/onair at 3pm EST on February 27

I’ve previously blogged about Erik Qualman’s Socialnomics book and work on “socialnomics” — here’s the latest version of his Social Media Revolution video for 2013:

What statistics stand out as you view the video? Drop a comment and your reflections here. I’d love to hear them.

Is it encouraged or shunned in your church?

Westminster Presbyterian Church is part of the Presbytery of San Fernando in Burbank, CA. Prior to the service they actually showed this video of how they handle cell phones in church.

This is such a great topic because you’re probably firmly rooted one side or the other.  .  .

Either cell phones are a menace, to the preacher, to the people around you, and a distraction from the activity of worship itself OR it can be an amazing tool that augments the worship experience as well as empowering the congregation to be evangelistic *during* the actual service itself.  

What is interesting is that ministries like YouVersion have even explicitly built services to encourage smart phone usage in church.

Which side are you on?  Are smart phone cell phones something that should be allows in church? Share your comments below.

Within Redeemer’s CFW is the Entrepreneurship Initiative – which hosts an annual conference on Gospel Entrepreneurship.  They also run an annual business plan competition, where ventures run by christian entrepreneurs have a shot at awards up to $25,000 for their non-profit, for-profit or arts start-ups.  This year’s theme for the Ei Forum conference is RISK: Faith or Folly.  I’m looking forward to hearing Tim Keller’s reflections on how thoughtful christian entrepreneurs can consider risk in a faith and work integration framework.

Here’s the blurb for my talk:

Risk and Rewards of PR & Social Media:

Do you feel the pressure to have a social media presence, but don’t know exactly how it will further your venture’s objectives? Are you a bit fuzzy about when your media campaigns are actually helping or hurting your cause? Strategic communications advisor Kenny Jahng will share concrete content marketing tactics at this year’s Ei Forum.  Kenny’s insights will help you reap the rewards while avoiding the risks involved with publicity campaigns for your venture.

Whether you can make it or not, what questions do you have about social media, PR and how you approach communications with the various audiences related to your organization?

But at the same time, a large part of the webmasters and communications directors for these organizations don’t know how to use the analytics data in a strategic manner.  What do I mean by that?  Are you looking at your stats in Google Analytics and just observing things about your site visitors….and then not do anything else different?  Or are you looking at your data and then making some decisions that change the way you communicate on the site or off the site?  Is the data helping you to refine the content produced and published on your site?  Are you able to reach out to new potential partners to explore how you can increase the impact and effectiveness in engaging your audience?  Most people are not in a position to say yes to most of these questions.

Here’s a great “tour” of Google Analytics that I recommend to people when they want to study up on all the goodness that Google offers through this free service for websites and communicators that use the web to reach and influence people.

The site has a decent list of topics listed so that you can either go through it all sequentially or jump around at your leisure.  Click through and check it all out:

Click here to check out the Google Analytics Tutorial

What is the latest thing you learned about Google Analytics or how to use data that it presents across various reports?

Today, I had the chance to spend time in NYC with other folks interested in today’s church and new media usage by church leaders and their communities. The New Media Project was the host of todays conference on the Digital Church: Theology & New Media.

For some reason, this conference on the digital future didn’t have any form of content streaming. One of the speakers who runs a large print magazine outfit even commented how he envisioned this conference with live interaction elements with Twitter, etc. He said he thought there would be some monitor with ongoing tweets or some other live connection to new media. He was right, there were a bunch of missed opportunities (i.e. the org’s new website is “under construction” a major no-no in today’s web reality, without the most critical piece, an email capture form that could be building an audience well before they are ready to roll).

So I did what any self-repecting digitally native participant would do: I lit up a Google+ Handout and invited people to join. (Eugene Cho dropped in while were were chatting away during a break).

It is important to keep investing in your trade, or as Seth Godin calls it, your art. What are you doing to keep yourself moving forward, growing in your own art?

If you are interested in some of the conversation, the #digchurch13 hashtag did have some interesting thoughts shared via that tweetstream:

Why Marketers love email lists

A recent survey by Econsultancy showed that 72% of marketing companies rate email as a good or excellent form of advertising. The reason for this is because it has such a great Return On Investment. In other words, the amount of time, infrastructure and resource it takes to do email marketing is well worth the return received through emailing.

When I was overseeing the communications for one of Hillsong’s national events, I had a conversion on my email marketing of 7-10%. That is a great return,especially for something that took only a few hours to write, format, and pull data from an existing email list.

Churches can leverage bulk emailing to promote events, blog content, changes in normal church schedules, gather surveys, request public reviews, perform follow ups, announce major news, and stay connected with a wide audience of people. Building an email list can be time consuming on the front end, but it is a lasting point of contact that requires little to no financial investment. In fact, when I first started doing email marketing, I only used Microsoft Office.

Here is how:

Building An Email List Using Microsoft Outlook

You will also hear people call email lists a “database,” but I think for people starting off, saying “email list” sounds less threatening. Open Microsoft Excel and fill out whatever fields you want to log across row one like this.

Normally I do First Name, Last Name, Email, List, Gender, Age, Engagement, Country, State, and City. The “List” field is what channel you received their details from. “Engagement” is what information they would like to receive. You can add other demographics or remove irrelevant ones; it really depends on what events and content you have as an organization. Consider adding a column for area of interest and church involvement.

Adding Data and Getting Emails Addresses

Start adding any contacts you may have and manually filling out the demographics you know about the person within the correct columns. It is okay to have blank fields. Really all you need is an email address to send and email,
everything else personalizes your emails to a relevant audience, that, and consent, is what separates you from spammers.

You can gather contact information by simply asking people you know for it, creating a subscription form on your website, pulling contacts from Facebook using Yahoo’s export Facebook contacts function, mass texts asking for email addresses, and having a printed forum at church for people to fill out. The truth is data entry takes time, but it is worth the small investment.

Turn your data into a table You can organize your email list by turning it into a table. Select all of your entered data at once and then click on “Insert/Table”. This will turn your raw information into a table that you can organize and filter by clicking on the down pointing arrows at the top of each column. Now you have a workable email list that is ready for sending.

Set Default Email In Outlook

Now open Microsoft Outlook. You need to set the email account you want to send your emails through as the default account. Microsoft Word automatically sends through your default email address on Outlook, so don’t forget to do this. Just go to “Preferences/Accounts” and then set the account you want as your
default.

Writing and Formatting

Write your email in Microsoft Word then format with a web safe font type. Your styling will be applied to your email. To add links, highlight your text to become a link and go to “Insert/Hyperlink” to add the URL.

Sending the Email

The next thing to do is what we call a Mail Merge. This is the process of sending out mass emails. Go to “Tools/Mail Merge Manager.” You will want to set “Document Type” to “Form Letters” by clicking “Create New”.

For “Recipients List,” under “Get List” click “Open Data Source” and select the Excel email list you created.

For “Insert Placeholders” you can drag a field name into your document to personalize your emails. For example, addressing the recipients by the “First

Name” in the email. Here is what an email could look like:

For “Preview Results,” you can just make sure everything is displaying properly before you send the emails.

Finally send your email by clicking on the envelope icon under “Complete Merge”. Then set “To:” as “Email,” fill out the subject line, then set “Send As” to HTML and send it.

Test Before Mass Sending

I recommend testing each email campaign before sending by using a list with only your personal email accounts before sending to everyone. This allows you to see exactly how the email will look on different accounts.

Hopefully this has been a helpful walk through. This method has personally helped me better manage relationships and grow events for churches. If you would like to follow more of my thoughts on church communications check
out Steven’s Church Marketing Website.

About Steven Records: Founder of ChurchGrowth.Info. Over the years Steven Records has had the privilege to do communications for some of the largest and most influential Christian events and organizations in the world. To connect with Steven follow him on Twitter and Google Plus.

But how do you build you list offline when you are running an event or better yet, remote somewhere else where you may or may not have access to the internet?

Check out this cool iPad app that MailChimp offers so that you can set-up a kiosk-like setting or even pass around an iPad to get people signed-up for a email list.

Imagine how you can use this app — that doesn’t rely upon an internet connection — to collect contact info in a large group / event setting.

The app is easy to configure and use.  Clean design, just like the main email marketing service at www.mailchimp.com

Imagine if you had an iPad available for first time visitors and offered them a chance to sign-up for your newsletter that comes with an autoresponder email series walking through some of your key staff, background/beliefs, snapshots of community life, links to videos of the top 3 sermon messages from the past year, etc.  Or a 30-day devotional written by your pastor or ministry leaders. Or  . . . .

Check out Chimadeedoo 2 for iPad

Here’s one worthy change in your routine that might have missed your list — but it is easy to learn, easy to implement, amazing in what it will do for your life at work.  Address head on, the dread that you have for going into work.

First you have to acknowledge that your workplace has become a place where you can’t get any work done:

Only after this realization, can you take up the Modern Meeting Manifesto and take aim at the crippling reasons for death by meeting that we all experience working with others in the work environment of today.  This past year, I was fortunate enough to read the short but powerful book by Al Pitampalli — Modern day warrior against the machine.

Like Jason Fried, Al has taken the risk of prescribing some radical things that our current workplace environments don’t accept too easily.  But if you can embrace just a couple of the prescriptions that Al provides in his book, The Modern Meeting Standard, your 2013 will be dramatically different in nature.

So go ahead, take a quick read and then dare to make a difference in order to get off of the hamster wheel you are stuck in.  If you’re smart you’ll follow the 7 principles of the Modern Meeting Manifesto:

1. Meet only to support a decision that has already been made.  Meetings aren’t for making decisions by committee.
2. Move fast. End on schedule. Force yourself to hold brief meetings.  Once you do this, you’ll force yourself to *not* waste time and get to the point.
3. Limit the number of attendees. To many meetings are simply informational for various participants.  Quit it.  Only gather people who can refute, confirm or change the decision being presented.
4. Reject the unprepared.  Send out agendas prior to the meeting period.  No agenda, cancel the meeting.
5. Produce committed action plans.  Hold people accountable.  Don’t just say the group will do things.
6. Refuse to be informational. Read the memo, it’s mandatory.  Meeting leaders must do their work before the meeting.  Participants must do their work before the meeting.
7. Work with brainstorms, not against them.  Brainstorms are one reason to bring several people into the same room together.  Embrace it.

One of the big items all of this points to is that meetings are expensive.  They interrupt a lot of co-workers from doing uninterrupted productive work.  And the combined cost to bring all those people into a single room is crazy expensive.  Meetings can be short.  Meetings can have less people.  Meetings can produce more results and momentum.  Only if you convene meetings only when necessary.

What is stopping you from just canceling the next recurring meeting that you lead?  What consequences would there be if you really did NOT hold it this week?

A/B Testing for conversion rates is a great way to see if simple iterations of your current site can make a big impact on results.

Check out this infographic on testing contact forms that you typically put on squeeze pages and other offer / registration form pages.

There’s 3 Reasons To Optimize Your Contact Forms:

1. You don’t use all of the data fields you collect.  Nope, think hard about why you need to know each and every field you ask for.  Because every additional field will limit your ability to get the maximum participation from site visitors.  You’re asking them to just walk away.
2. Simple changes can drastically change how much effort you have to put into promoting and advertising your offers.  If you engage in paid promotional activities, conversion rates can radically change the ROI on your investment.  In fact, you might have enough traffic as it is.  You just need to change the user experience when they get to your site.
3. Less data collected means less data to manage.  Make it easier on yourself and manipulate less uncecessary profile data.

One question that arises for anyone that pushes back or hesitates on testing for optimized response rates: Would you rather have more people in a permission-based relationship (so you can ask for more profile data as you go, as you need it) with your organization, or have drastically less (over 100% less in some cases!) people that you know about at all.

Is this infographic compelling enough to get you to reconsider just how much information you really need to ask for?  Say “Yes” in the comments if you see the benefits of testing this stuff!

When we create custom infographics for clients it usually takes about a week or so to turn them around and costs the client anywhere from $500-750 on average to produce.  The results have been phenomenal creating some powerful case studies for integrating visual media into anyone’s marketing communications campaigns.

But for those times where you want to produce a quick infographic, there are other resources out there like Piktochart which can produce interesting visual content for your blog or flyer or other smaller project.  Check out this quick video where you’ll see some screenshots of the menus inside the piktochart online service:

Just earlier this week, I published an infographic that I whipped up using this method:

There is of course a learning curve to using the online infographic generator with it’s set of online toolbox because you want to control details of layouts, text placement, etc.

But to be truthful, the real challenge of infographic production is not the graphics but being able to use data in order to tell a story that is compelling.  That’s where the real value is when we create custom infographics for clients.  When we succeed, people get the message and are compelled share or follow the call to action in it.

But if you’re up for dabbling in infographic land in the short term, these online infographic tools are a decent beginning point.

So you probably are asking your community to share your posts. To retweet and thumb up Like’s for your status updates. To +1 interesting content in your feed.

But have you explained to them WHY you want them to do it? More importantly have you shown them how their simple actions can help them be a part of the work your organization is doing?

Check out this simple direct mail piece attempts to do with their community. Do you see how they are framing the opportunity for each of the thousands of people in the social media community?

On the back, the larger than life number is shared in a way that invites the person to be a part of the plan.

How are you framing the WHY opportunity for your supporter base? Are you inviting them into the larger story or are you just drilling them with neverending requests to pimp out their personal social network for something where only your organization benefits?

If you aren’t aware of some of the trends going on with Bible engagement and churches today, take a look at the infographic I pulled together to help share the situation in the Church:

So for 40 days leading up to Easter, we will be reading the Bible in 225 small groups across New Jersey. We even have several church online groups forming so that our community of online worshippers can participate with us. All the details are available at www.40daybiblechallenge.com

The program is being put together in collaboration with Biblica, who is the copyright holder of the NIV Bible. We have been able to produce thousands of custom printed Bibles for our campaign through their Community Bible Experience. With Biblica’s help, we’ve also been able to make it available in PDF, Kindle, ePub, and audio formats. In addition, we’ve produced a spanish translation as well as kids versions of the daily bible readings. We’ve got iTunes podcasts. We also have links to the YouVersion reading plan available for your smart phone. And to top it off, we have a daily email devotional that will be sent out every day to keep everyone encouraged and on track. There you go, no excuse NOT to read it with us.

I’m excited to see what happens when our entire community is in sync reading the same portions of text weekly over the next 8 weeks. What is been surprising is the enthusiasm people have shown to sign-up to read together. You would think in today’s day and age that reading the entire NT Bible wouldn’t be a huge draw. But by doing it together, it has brought out the best participation and energy we have seen in awhile.

Have you ever read the Bible together with your entire church? How did it go?

Your volunteers and team members deserve a pat on the back.

So what is holding you back from giving some pats on the back?

You might have a outbound marketing strategy, or a social media strategy, but do you have a Thank You Strategy in place?

Here is a copy of a postcard I got from the Vatican recently where the Pope himself wrote me a handwritten thank you note for helping out at a church event. The postage and postmark are totally legit from Rome, Italy for sure. Of course I love the fact that someone went out of his way to arrange such a fun little gesture.

It stays pinned to my wall at work for anyone to see. I have had several people strike up conversations because of that one little thank you note. I have also been told that a volunteer has pinned one of my thank you notes to their bulletin board at work so they can see it every say. Can you ever imagine where people in your community might talk about how your ministry is so appreciative of their contributions?

What can you do to make thank you notes a regular part of your routine, no matter what specific job or role you are in currently?

My challenge to you this week: send someone you have been working with a short note of thanks I encouragement. In fact, send three. And don’t do it via email. Send it via trusty old snail mail. And sit back and watch how impactful it can be.

After renovations which made grocery shopping fun and delicious (new food court in the actual store!), traffic went through the roof. But the store didn’t stop there.

Thinking about the user experience even before we walk in the door, the management realized while shopping inside the store was fun, getting a parking spot wasn’t anymore.

So what did they do? Call them crazy, but I now have free valet parking at my grocery store. The first in the entire state apparently.

What are you doing to make the experience of your guests, audience, followers, supporters and volunteers to be a WOW-experience? Where can you go further to put their needs first?

If I looked at your website, is it really tuned for first time visitors? Or is your content set up in a way that “everyone else does it”?

Do you talk more about what you need from your supporters (like tons of “give give give! Just give us money!” type messaging) vs what they might really want to explore or hear about regarding their opportunity to participate in impactful work?

Do you talk more about you, as in your “institution” organization? Or do you really celebrate “you,” the person reading your content — you know, the volunteers, supporters, constituents who are the real heros, without which you wouldn’t have a job?

What can you do to pull out all the stops to out to put your audience first, kind of like giving free valet parking for me to run in and grab a carton of milk at my ShopRite?

Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users…in contrast with usability inspection methods where experts use different methods to evaluate a user interface without involving users.

Usability testing focuses on measuring a human-made product’s capacity to meet its intended purpose…[it] involves watching people trying to use something for its intended purpose

Today, I interviewed Tony Albanese, product marketer over at ZURB.  They offer a suite of website development apps including SolidifyApp.com, VerifyApp.com and Notableapp.com.

I have been using VerifyApp.com recently on live site development projects I’m leading currently and it has been a great tool to validate what we’ve intended to build as well as identify some things from the users’ perspective that we never would have thought about without user testing input.

Useability testing allows you to address navigation, content presentation, and other items to improve the user experience which in turn increases the likelihood of the site to deliver on the original objectives for user engagement.

Here’s the interview video below.  Watch it and I’ll join you afterwards below:

Here’s an real-life example of what Verifyapp.com was able to uncover regarding a client’s website recently.  Although there were 3 different ways to sign-up for a newsletter or email list on the home page of a website, over 40% of the users didn’t know where to click when prompted to sign-up for free content, email lists or newsletters from the site.  That tells you that there is a communication issue going on.  Either the site is too busy and has distracting elements, or the calls to action are not clear, or placement of the sign-up forms are not visible enough given the current layout.  This is prompting a look at how to narrow the user experience so that sign-up for permission based email list relationships is one of the core pieces of the homepage offerings.  Of course, we’ll test out sample layouts along the way to ensure we’re improving the success rate.  That is what user testing can do for your website.

If you are a nonprofit, does your site clearly allow visitors to find and use the donation forms on your site?

If you are a church, does your site make it easy for prospective visitors to find the appropriate information they need in order to decide and plan on a visit?

If you are a cause-related organization, are the volunteer opportunities being promoted on your pages presented in a way so that the most urgent yet relevant positions can be seen?

Those are just some of the initial questions we can begin to address with user testing.

So what are you curious about with your own website?  What *assumed* function can you test to see if you really should be concerned enough to do something about it?