What Every Church Leader Should Know about Building Digital Community

This is the first post of a new series on using Design Thinking to build virtual church community. Click here for our second post, which details how to start the Design Thinking process!

“Worship attendance is fine, but it doesn’t feel like a community anymore.”

It’s a quote I continue to hear from church leaders navigating our new normal. Perhaps you’ve said something similar at one time or another. Sure, members are tuning in to watch live-streamed or recorded worship. Maybe your finances are even secure thanks to members stepping up their generosity in recent months.

But still, something’s missing. We miss that sense of community our church enjoyed prior to March 2020. We lament that it’s just not the same, we acknowledge that an entirely virtual church is often a poor substitute for the face to face community that brings so many of us to church in the first place.

It’s hard to build a digital church community in “normal” circumstances, let alone during a pandemic where many of our families are juggling working demanding jobs from home while homeschooling their kids. But as church leaders, we are nevertheless called to build community, even when such a task seems unachievable.

While tactics for building a digital church community will vary from one congregation to another, community building in these uncertain times begins with a clear awareness of the challenges and opportunities involved with building up our now-distributed communities.

With an understanding of why it’s so difficult to build this digital community and why it’s so important to do so, we can begin to find the small acts of community building that will bring us together in profound and powerful ways.

The challenges are often self-evident. Our communities are busier than they’ve ever been. Parents are trying to teach and motivate their students, who are often reluctant to learn virtually (four in ten students didn’t complete any virtual homework last spring).

They’re also burnt-out in digital connection. Zoom fatigue is very real. Google searches for the query “Zoom fatigue” increased 1,000% between April and May 2020. Some have even suggested that online calls lead to unhealthily low levels of respiration - we don’t breathe as we should while online. This observation, described as “Zoom Apnea,” may explain why distributed, virtual work is so exhausting. Those who are working from home have little energy for additional digital engagement after the workday ends, and hardly any appetite for more video calls. And of course, an election is taking place. 55% of Americans are currently “worn out” by political posts on social media, while 70% find online politics discussions “exhausting." So many of our assumptions on digital church community intersect with social media, yet social media has its own set of problems.

But just as there are many challenges, there are even greater opportunities. If we find a way to create a sense of virtual community within our church, we can provide a moment of Sabbath rest, where we can all pause together, breathe together, pray together. If we find a way to connect our flock during this time of social distancing, our church can provide a concrete taste of grace and forgiveness, often lacking in social media environments. Perhaps most importantly, if we find a way to create a digital community in these divided times, we can inspire hope in the promise that God is greater than any pandemic, that Christ is our salvation, and that these challenging times will end.

So how do we realize these opportunities? How do we build a digital community that promotes a sense of rest, connection, and hope? We begin with the acknowledgment that community building is highly contextual. What works for one congregation will not work for the church across the street. We also start with the tacknowledgmenthat not all digital community is synchronous. In an environment of Zoom fatigue, we need not log on together to find meaningful connection.

From this starting line, we must apply the design thinking process to craft meaningful community moments that resonate within our context.

What is design thinking? According to Interaction-Design.org,

"Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods."

Design thinking can build community in these challenging times because it facilitates the identification of alternative strategies and solutions. As a process, it moves us well-beyond the proverbial box, revealing the best ideas for our ministry context.

In upcoming blog posts, we'll explore design thinking and what it means for the church. We'll dive into each specific step in the design thining process (from empathizing to testing and everywhere in between), and offer suggestions for using digital tools to support collaborative brainstorming. Many, if not all church leaders, have lamented the breakdown of community during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's time to start rebuilding. Let the designing begin!

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@ryanpanzer is the author of Grace and Gigabytes.

What Every Church Leader Should Know about Google Analytics

This is the latest in an ongoing series on digital marketing for church leaders - be sure to check out the companion post on advertising with Google!

"You can't manage what you can't measure."

-Peter Drucker

If you're a church leader, you've likely grown accustomed to measuring some key numbers in your church. You likely know (approximately) how many attended a worship service, or more recently how many watched an online worship service. You might know how much money you have in your budget, and how much you received in tithes and offerings last Sunday. It's likely that somewhere in your career you were trained to think about the"butts and bucks" numbers as the key performance indicators for your congregation (for more on how to move past "butts and bucks," check out Katie Langston's blog on Faith+Lead).

Doing church online requires a new approach to measurement. What matters in the virtually distributed church is the effectiveness with which your church's digital presence (ie, its website and social media) connects with your community. We can measure this level of connection with free digital tools, the most insightful of which is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is an application that automatically collects data on website traffic, instantly organizing that data into reports and dashboards. Fully customizable and completely free to use, Analytics is a must-use tool for determining whether digital efforts are achieving the intended results.

When you start using Google Analytics, you'll be able to measure how many visited your website, what they did there, whether they stayed and engaged or quickly "bounced," if they viewed multiple pages or just one, and if they eventually returned. This data helps church leaders to determine when, where, and how communities are coming together on the church website. All of this data, of course, is aggregated and anonymized to protect user privacy. In this post, we'll look at some of the first steps you'll want to take as a church leader during COVID.

To get started, you'll need to sign up for Google Analytics with a Gmail account. Once you've signed up for your website, find and add the Analytics "Tracking Code" to your church website. The code snippet is what sends website data to Google Analytics, enabling you to view important reports on site visits and user activity.

Installing the "Tracking Code" tends to be the most confusing implementation step for new Analytics users, so don't be alarmed if takes you a moment to complete the implementation.

Simply copy the code from Analytics and paste the tracking code beneath the <head> tag of your website.

What's a <head> tag, you might ask? It's the "header" of your website, appended to all pages on your domain. If you can find the HTML for your website, all you'll need to do is paste the code near the top. Google Analytics will do the rest.

Once the tracking code is added to your website, you'll start to see site data in Google Analytics, which will look something like this:

With the code properly installed and site data showing up in your Analytics accounts, it's time to start measuring. While Analytics offers millions of datapoints and segmentations for you to analyze, a beginner Analytics users should focus on users, session duration, and pages/session.

"Users" measures the number of unique visitors to your church website as determined by the date range in the upper-right corner of the Analytics UI. A key question for a church during COVID is the number of users relative to the size of your congregation. If your website is effectively connecting to your community, the number of users in a 30-day window should be similar to your unique monthly attendees. If a church saw an attendance of 350 on a typical pre-COVID Sunday, it should strive for 350 monthly website users.

"Session duration"is the average time spent on your webpages during a single visit to your site. If I visit your homepage for 60 seconds and then leave your website, my session duration is 60 seconds. If I visit five different pages on your website for 10 seconds each, my session duration is also 60 seconds. Since all churches and all websites are different, there isn't a benchmark "session duration" that we ought to strive for. Rather, session duration is a metric of directionality. A key question for today's church leader is whether session duration is trending upward or downward. When church communities find relevant, spiritually-edifying content on a site, session duration increases. As you build out your site and add new types of content like blogs and video pages, see if session duration increases.

"Pages/Session"is the average number of pages a site visitor views per each unique visit to your site. If I visit your site but remain on your homepage, my Pages/Session is 1. If I visit your site and view your Worship page, your blog, and your Contact page, my Pages/Session is 3. Pages/Session is a helpful metric in evaluating whether your website is efficiently funneling traffic to key pages within your site. As a church, you'll likely have a page for worship times/streaming, a blog/videos page, a giving page, and many other pages that are vital to your ministry. Your site should make it easy for a user to switch between pages. A key question for today's church leader is how to maintain a Pages/Session average of 1.5 or more, indicating that the average user connects to more than one resource during their session.

Google Analytics can be overwhelming to those without backgrounds in tech or marketing. If you're feeling like there's too much data and it's hard to know where to get started, take a step back and review some of Google's self-paced learning materials.

Then, identify two or three key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will commit to tracking over the course of four weeks. At the end of four weeks, consider what these numbers might tell you about the quality of your website.

What changes might you make based on this data? That's fundamentally what using Google Analytics is about - not numbers, not graphs, but deriving insight from data. With enough practice and sufficient patience, every church leader can use Google Analytics to strengthen their connections with the community, particularly in an era of disruption.

What Every Church Leader Should Know about Google Ads

As a church leader, you want your ministry to show up on Google, because you know that's the first place many look when looking for a church.

But you don't have the time, energy, or expertise for a massive website overhaul, nor do you have the resources to publish the "relevant and original" content Google seems to prefer in its organic search results. Moreover, you know that searches for "church" are on the decline, with more ministries vying for fewer clicks. The "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" game seems to be a losing proposition.

Searches for "Lutheran church" have declined nearly 50% since 2004.

Accordingly, the fastest way to the top of Google's search listings is paid advertising via Google Ads (formerly AdWords). With Google Ads, you can rocket from the basement of Google's "organic" search listings (the unpaid search results) to appear front and center when it matters most. You'll select the specific searches where you want your ministry's ads to show up. You'll target a specific geography, write some basic ad copy, and the visitors will start showing up.

While some church leaders are reluctant to consider paid online advertising, fearing costs and maintenance requirements, my experience has shown local Google advertising to be cost-effective and easy to implement. With clicks on the search term "church near me" averaging about $1.45 USD (source: Google Keyword Planner), most ministries can generate hundreds of site visits per month on a lower budget than what they use for mileage reimbursements!

Search results for "church near me" - the word "Ad" indicates paid listings

Set up for success

When I worked at Google, I helped nonprofits and small businesses set up and optimize their online advertising. Most of these organizations operated on a shoestring budget and had no tolerance for wasted ad spend. These organizations, undoubtedly like your ministry, required highly-precise ad campaigns targeted to just the right searches. While Google Ads has countless targeting settings to adjust, most churches will find value from the following:

First, be specific with keywords. Rather than focusing on the generic term "church" or "church near me," choose denomination and geographic-specific terms. For a Lutheran church in Madison, WI, I would only use the following keywords, set to "phrase match" to exclude irrelevant searches:

• "Lutheran church"

• "Madison Lutheran church"

• "Madison WI Lutheran church"

• "Lutheran church near me"

Second, be ultra-concentrated with geography. By default, most search advertising targets too broad an audience. As a church, your primary audience is hyper-local. Use a specific radius around your church building to only show the ads to those within a short drive of your ministry. I recommend that most churches start with a 20-mile radius.

Third, opt-out of Google's extras. I've seen too many new advertisers burn through their budget because they didn't opt out of Google's "Display Network," which extends your ads to sites like blogs and YouTube. While it's important to advertise on mobile phones (which account for half of all search volume), the "branding" potential of the Display Network leads to big trouble for immediate-response advertisers like churches!

For more on setting up a Google Ads account, check out this resource (from Google) and this resource (specifically for churches!).

Mistakes to avoid

In my experience helping nonprofits and small businesses with Google Ads, I've noticed a few "trendy" mistakes that detract from online advertising success. I wanted to share them here so you can avoid making these very mistakes!

Mistake #1: Expecting an immediate response. While Google Ads drive immediate traffic to your site, they're unlikely to drive immediate engagement with your ministry, particularly in the form of attendance at worship services. Like any "path to purchase," the decision to engage with a church requires multiple "touchpoints" or interactions with your "brand." One ad click does not lead to one worship attendee. Chance are, you'll need those who clicked your ads to visit your site or social media accounts seven total times before they show up to one of your events. If your pews (virtual or otherwise) aren't filling up after you activate your campaign, be patient. Give any campaign at least 1-2 months before passing judgment.

Mistake #2: Too many starts and stops. Many well-intentioned church leaders tend to "tinker" with their ad settings a little too much. Often, they'll start and stop their campaigns haphazardly as their ads are just getting off the ground (Ads campaigns can be activated or paused at any time). Google's algorithms are geared towards delivering you high-quality web traffic. Let the algorithms do their work, give them enough time to do their thing!

Mistake #3: Not reading the fine print. Google goes to great lengths to document, explain, and teach advertisers how to succeed on their search engine. Pay attention to their resources, especially those that you will see within the Google Ads interface when you set up your first ad campaign. With so much to learn, it's important to move methodically through campaign setup. Take your time, don't rush. And remember that the budget you set is for each individual day and is not in fact your monthly or annual budget!

Find a Partner

Some ministries have the desire but not the time and energy to begin advertising on Google. If you consider yourself to be in this situation, I recommend reaching out to a Google Partner, a trusted and certified advertising agency that can set up and run your campaigns, often for a small fee. These agencies have proven their knowledge of campaign management best practices and have demonstrated a consistent ability to generate success. Unless your church plans to spend big bucks, look for the agencies that specialize in small business advertising. Find a partner today through Google's Partner Finder app.

Google Ads during COVID-19

With many church buildings closed, some may be reluctant to advertise on Google, or on any new marketing channel. But there's never been a more important moment for the church to actively reach out and form new (virtual) connections in their community. This pandemic is the great psychological, emotional, and spiritual crisis of our times. People need grace, they need prayer, they need to know that God is near. Searches for "prayer," "meditation," and even "church near me" are up year over year. Church leaders are called to tell the Gospel story in a way that spreads. Google Ads is a first step in fulfilling this call. The world needs a word of grace. Get your ministry online so you can proclaim that word to an anxious world.