Want something for free? This Thursday, June 23rd, Drew Goodmanson (CEO of Monk Development) and I will be conducting a webinar entitled “Six Online Trends Your Ministry Must Address Today”.  The webinar starts at 9:00 AM Pacific Time and ends an hour later. CLA, sponsor of the webinar, has graciously given me an access code that will allow my you, my blog readers, free access! Normally, you would have to be a member of CLA to access this webinar, but if you follow this link, you can register for free. As of last week, there were already almost 200 ministries signed up to participate – why don’t you join us? I hope to “see” you online this Thursday morning!

The outline of the webinar is as follows:

• Introduction
• Trend #1: The Web’s Exponential Growth Requires Organization Change
• Trend #2: We Now Live in a “Post-Website World.”
• Trend #3: The “App-ification” Revolution is Beginning
• Trend #4: Mobile is the Future. Mobile is Now.
• Trend #5: Focus on the Fringe That is Central to Your Success
• Trend #6: There is No Longer “One Right Way” to Be Online.
• Questions and Answers

I will be using a Prezi presentation, which I have uploaded to prezi.com for those of you who want to take a look. The Prezi is embedded here.

I also created a jing video to demonstrate how to use Google forms to collect data:

For those of you who were not at the presentation, you may also want to get a copy of the audio of the presentation, which CLA is making available for $9.00. That link is also below.

Link to PDF of presentation

Purchase MP3 audio from CLA

One of my first projects in the area of online ministry was to seek an answer to the question: what makes online ministry successful? This led to the development of a research project to determine the “best practices” in online ministry.  From November 2007 to April 2008, over 300 ministries took a survey and reported on how they were doing Internet ministry. From the data collected, a series of “best practices” were developed matching ministries who reported success with their Internet presence with answers to the survey questions. I presented the results of this research at the Internet Ministry Conference in October 2008.

How did I determine “best practices”? In the survey, I asked each ministry a set of questions that correlated with “success”. A “success score” was developed for each ministry. I then asked a series of questions about their online ministry practices in the area of technology, people, and process (my “Internet Ministry Framework”).  By taking the ministries who score the highest in their “success score” together, I was able to find which practices they had in common and develop a set of “best practices”.  The twelve best practices that I can recommend for any online ministry are as follows:

For full details on these best practice recommendations and more about the research project itself, download the report from the “Resources” section of either at my main site or my Facebook page. And while you’re there, take a look at the other resources available.

I am also looking to update these recommendations in the near future. If you have feedback or comments on these or other best practices, feel free to leave me a comment!

I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to become a fan of this blog on Facebook and to share it with others who are doing ministry online as well. I also encourage you to interact with my posts and let me know what you think.  Thanks for your support and I look forward to good discussions on online ministry.

• Shane Hipps interview – we watched a short snippet of this 30-minute interview I did with Shane via Skype. In this interview, Shane describes his book and his thoughts on online community.
• Best Practices in Internet Ministry – this is the research writeup of my two-year research project on the technology, people, and processes that make ministries successful.
• Strategy Worksheet – this worksheet walks you through the steps needed to create a strategy based on the principles discussed in the session.

For those of you who came to my session, thank you! And if you did not, you can still feel free to use these resources.

For readers of my blog, I will also embed it here. This embedded video will work for as long as I have the video available on my genesys11 site. It runs about a half an hour, but is well worth it.

I also left a spot for comments on just how these ministries were doing “search engine optimization” (SEO) on their sites:

“The more we are integrated with other sites (Facebook, blogs, etc.) the better.”
“Ask the congregation to search for the site.”
“Create web pages for other churches in the area.”
“I believe that doing SEO is just part of doing good site design. If you have a web site, you want people to find it. If you want people to find it, you must show up in search results.”

In my e-business strategy class this week, we spent some time reviewing SEO concepts, using Google’s starter document on search engine optimization as our talking point.  Now, there are two components to ranking high on a Google search: 1) good SEO design on your web page, and 2) lots of other sites linking to yours. You have full control over the first, not so much over the second. Many will say (see comment above) that the best SEO is done by making your site the greatest site in its niche.  And this is true and will surely help you in the second component listed above. But why not follow Google’s advice and design your site to be as search-engine friendly as possible?

Anyways, all this is to say that if you are trying to figure out how to make your site show better in search results, then one of the best places to start is Google’s SEO document.  Most of the changes discussed in this document require you to know how to modify HTML on your site, so you may want to give this to your webmaster/tech guru.

• Pew Internet and American Life Project home page
• Report on use of podcasting (2008)
• Report on use of video sites (2008)
• Report on “networked families” (2008)
• Report on “faith online” (2004)

Link to Church Marketing Sucks blog entry

Link to research page on genesys11