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!

---

@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 Facebook Ads

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!

In the first post, we looked at why and how church leaders should advertise on Google. But Google Ads are only one-side of the digital advertising coin. Google provides the ability to advertise to those looking for a church right here, right now.

But Facebook provides the tools to advertise to those looking for a church before they know they even know they are looking for a church! Google helps advertisers to meet the demand of customers seeking a specific product or service. That's helpful when the service you offer, whether it is facemasks or virtual school support, is growing in search interest. It's only somewhat useful to churches, where search interest has stagnated and even declined in the last five years. As a church leader, you should be advertising on Facebook because you're called to bring the Gospel story to your community even if they're not specifically looking for it.

The importance of audience-based advertising

Facebook Ads succeed because they put your message in front of users whose online interests align to the goals of an organization. They work for churches because they introduce your ministry to like-minded community members who are unfamiliar with the work of your Christian community. Within your context, there are more Facebook users interested in faith, spirituality, and social justice than there are Google searches for those specifically looking for a new church home.

Over one-third of American Millennials identify within the "spiritual but not religious" category. This audience of approximately twenty-four million Americans may not have a church home, but they believe in God, pray, and read scripture at a rate that is nearly identical to church-affiliated Christians.

The spiritual but not religious group also uses Facebook extensively (despite the rumors you might have heard, Facebook remains by far world's most popular social network). 77% of Millennials use Facebook daily. This group shares countless affinities with the work of your ministry, their spiritual practices are similar, their hunger for justice is near identical, they even share many of the core theological convictions that define your ministry. They just lack an invitation to involvement, an opportunity to hear the story of what God is up to with your ministry. That's why it's so important to combine Facebook's powerful audience-based advertising with Google's search engine marketing.

Facebook Ads share in common many of the same advertising settings as their competitor, Google Ads. There's still an opportunity to target ads to a specific community, focusing on a tight radius around your church building. There's still an ability to pay only for clicks that drive new traffic to your website. And there's still the reality of these clicks costing mere cents on the dollar, a fraction of the cost of marketing in print, within publications, or on television or radio. I suggested in my post on Google Ads that a church could generate hundreds of new site visitors for less than the cost of a pastor's mileage reimbursement. With Facebook Ads, a church could generate hundreds of visits from community members who have never heard of the congregation, for less than the cost of coffee and donuts during pre-Covid coffee hours.

Set up for success

As with Google Ads, there are some settings you'll want to get right from the start of your advertising test. I'll list a few of them here, but you'll want to consult two other resources before you activate your campaigns. First, Tithe.ly offers an approachable and free startup guide to any church leader who is trying Facebook Ads for the first time. Facebook also offers a free online course to any first-time advertiser.

There are two settings you'll want to get right from the start. The first is your ad "copy." You don't need to be Don Draper to write good ad copy for Facebook. Just write a compelling call to action. It can be as simple as "Experience grace and restoration - join for online worship Sunday at 9!" Be clear about how, where, and when post viewers can connect with your ministry. And don't forget a high-resolution image. Image-based ads are viewed more, clicked more, and noticed more!

The second setting you'll want to get right is your ad targeting. Facebook builds its advertising campaigns around location and other audience characteristics. As with Google Ads, you'll want to set a target radius around your congregation. But don't stop there. Narrow your ads so that they display for those who have a demonstrated interest in faith and spirituality. This is done through Facebook's Detailed Targeting settings. In the following screenshot, you'll see example settings for a Madison, WI, Millennial-focused ad campaign targeting ads to those who are interested in faith, prayer, social justice, or Lutheranism.

Once you set your targeting criteria, Facebook will ask you whether you want to run the ad continuously or for a set timeframe. For most churches, I suggest running a 30-day test with a $5/day investment.

Ethics and privacy concerns

It's no secret that Facebook has been scrutinized over its handling of user data. Their business model bundles and anonymizes user data, then sells that data to advertisers in the form of ad targeting. This should raise ethical questions for the church leader. But the keywords here are bundling and anonymity. You'll never be able to target ads to specific users. You'll never even have access to data on specific users, or even on specific groups of Facebook users (want to see how Facebook characterizes your interests? Check out this page). And as a Facebook advertiser, you are not given any special access to protected information about consumers.

Still, some will question whether it is ethical to advertise on a platform that makes its money targeting ads based on user internet behavior. I would advise church leaders working through this quandary to perform a simple ethical calculation. Weigh the opportunities from bringing the Gospel message to unchurched and unheard audiences against any concerns you might have about Facebook's ad targeting. Does the good of engaging new segments of your community in God's graceful and restorative work in the world outweigh the misgivings you may have about how Facebook makes its money?

For more on the ethics of Facebook advertising, check out this blog post from Rebel Interactive.

Facebook Ads for churches during COVID

Some church leaders may hesitate to advertise on Facebook, due to the uncertainty of being a church navigating a global pandemic. While it may be true that we don't know when our buildings will reopen and when in-person gatherings will resume, we do know that 2020 has been hard on us all. We also know that social media sites have become the most contentious platforms on the web. Those using social media are wandering through a landscape defined by cancel culture, mudslinging, hyperpartisanship, and trolling. They need an oasis of grace. They need an escape to Sabbath rest and togetherness. Your ministry offers this oasis, it provides this escape, even if your worship service is held on YouTube or Zoom or Facebook Live. Your church may have left the building, but it still provides exactly what our world needs: a restorative word for a divided team, a word of healing in an era of pandemic illness, a word of rest during a year that has shocked and exhausted us all.

The world needs to hear from you. Facebook will help you get the word out. Please don't hesitate.