The greatest message in the world is nothing if it cannot be heard or in this case, read! Often, a church will spend a great deal of money developing a “cool” website that really doesn’t give its congregation a reason to revisit it. So how is that message really getting to the members? Reminds me of the logic question: If a tree falls in the forest, yet no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?
First generation websites were mostly online yellow page ads – not much more than static information about the church. Because the number of web hits drops dramatically when the information remains static, the next generation deemed to increase traffic by making the information more dynamic by building the site using technical capabilities of a content management system. However, in the fast pace of people lives, most people do not think, “Wow, it’s been a week since I have gone to the church website; I better go check it out!” Changing content is simply not enough to get someone to revisit a website over and over.
In comes the “church transaction.” What if you give the congregation a reason to go visit the church website to conduct some form of church business? And what if that church business was something they could do in the comforts of their own home or office instead of calling the church office or standing in line at a kiosk between services? I have never found anyone who enjoys standing in line for any purpose – maybe it could be #11 of those things that Perry Noble says you will never hear at church? “I wish I could stand in a line to sign up for the women’s retreat!”
Third generation websites offer reasons for the congregation to visit them – and it’s not just for commerce purposes (i.e., to buy a book or sermon series DVD). The website of a dynamic church allows its congregation to go online to conduct “self service” transactions for things like signing up for a marriage seminar, or scheduling an online contribution or finding a home group bible study.
This not only provides a convenient service to the person; it also frees up the staff to focus on Ministry instead of administration. How much better could a Bible study or marriage seminar be if the organizers could focus primarily on the content of the event rather than the registration and administration of the event – who signed up, who’s paid up and who really showed up? And how much better is the experience of calling the church switchboard because a portion of those calls are off-loaded to be handled by the web? And how much more of the website message would be read because people had an on-going reason to go there in the first place?
Grace to you as you go out and implement WebLink,
Jeff Hook