So you think your church needs a website. Or a new site. Or a better site. Rock on. Welcome to Church Websites 101, a quick and dirty series about how to start or restart your church’s website.
A key to any successful marketing is to know your audience. You don’t advertise heart disease medicine during Hannah Montana. And 60 Minutes is likely not the place to plug your Transformers toys. Marketers are experts at knowing their audience. Churches could learn a thing or two about this as well.
It’s called targeted marketing, and in general churches don’t like it. After all, Jesus told us to go into all the world and preach the gospel. He didn’t tell us to segment the market and only reach specific cultural groups. Churches want to cast a wide net and reach everybody. That’s a commendable goal, but reaching everybody is a good way to reach nobody.
If you’re like most churches, you probably bristle at that statement. That’s fine, we don’t need to argue about missionology. But knowing your audience has important implications as you sit down to build your website. You can ignore the advice about targeted marketing, but there are still realities about your audience that will change what you do on the web.
I can imagine no greater failure than a website designed for Internet Explorer 6 that’s loaded with animated GIFs and targeted to an audience of iPhone using Twitter-heads. Except maybe a site loaded with streaming video and fancy coding that requires the latest browser upgrade targeted to an audience of Luddite baby boomers who never bothered to open their company-issued Blackberrys.
Who Is Your Audience?
First of all, you need to look back at your overall strategy and your plan for your site. Are you building a site for your church members or for potential visitors in your community? (Or some other group? Some churches build their website with a worldwide audience in mind.) You need to clearly define that audience.
What Do They Do Online?
Next, you need to figure out some specifics about the behaviors of that audience. How widespread is broadband usage in your area? How technically savvy is your audience? Are they using Internet Explorer 6 or the beta version of Chrome? Do they know what RSS is? Do they use e-mail? Are people constantly texting or is that behavior frowned upon? The answers to these questions will have major implications for your website. If the majority of your audience is technically inept, you need to scale it back and keep things simple. If your audience is full of techno-hipsters, ramp it up.
How Can You Reach Them?
As you ask these questions a clear picture will develop of who your audience is and how you can reach them.
- You might discover that Facebook is the place to be for your audience and you need to have a major presence on Facebook that’s integrated with your site.
- Or maybe you learn that your audience loves e-mail and while you can provide an RSS feed, you better make sure there’s an option to subscribe via e-mail.
- Maybe your audience wants to create their own content and if you don’t give them an outlet on your site it will never gain traction.
The important thing is to learn about your audience and apply those lessons to how you build your site.
Reaching Multiple Audiences
As you learn about your audience you’ll find more and more segmented groups. You’re not likely to have an audience entirely of hardcore techies. That’s OK. The beauty of the web is that it’s easy to serve multiple audiences. While you need to know and cater to your audience, you can still give options that appeal to minority groups within that audience. Having a mobile version of your site will please the texting masses but it won’t confuse or distract the IE 6 users.
Keep It In Perspective
Just remember to keep things in perspective. If only 10% of your audience is technically savvy, limit your time on the techie toys to something proportionate. If the majority of your audience is still loving the snail mail, printed-on-paper newsletter, your website might need to be a tiny percentage of your time and effort. There’s no sense building something nobody will use.
Know your audience. It’ll change your website.
More Church Websites 101:
- Check out the full series, Church Websites 101.
- Or get those resources and more in our ebook, Getting Started in Church Communication: Web Basics:
Emily S
April 12, 2011
Thanks for this series! I just started as the Communication Director at my church, and my number one task is to redesign the website. These tools are really valuable as we work through planning the new site.
Tonja
May 2, 2011
What’s the best way to ask these questions? We’ve got quite a variety of attenders. We’ve been hesitant to post questions like these on our website because the answers may be skewed toward the techie people, while the questions posted in the program might skew older and more traditional (paper-oriented). Or should we be going outside to see where the majority of our community lies in these areas? And how would we do that?
Thanks for the series, though. It’s been very helpful.
Kevin D. Hendricks
May 2, 2011
Tonja, you could start by surveying your church. If you’re worried about getting skewed results with an online survey or a paper survey, do both and combine the results. There are also a lot of sources that can give you local demographics for your area (here’s one from a few years ago). You could also just take the old fashioned (and cheap!) approach and go around your neighborhood and talk to people.
The exact approach depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and who you’re looking to serve. If you want to serve the butts you’ve already got in your pews, survey your congregation. If you’re ready to reach out, you better get some demographic info on your surrounding community.