Like most churches, we are dependent on email as way to communicate with our congregation throughout the week. On any given week we send an average of 20,000 emails using ConstantContact. This includes but is not limited to…

• 8 Minutes with God – a daily devotional email that is written by our pastors, staff and elders. Yes, that’s right, we send a daily email.
• Weekly Update – our weekly enews that highlights church news during the week [and is a huge supplement for us not having a printed weekly bulletin].
• Group Emails – our Children’s Ministry, 20s and 30s ministries each send out their own weekly updates as well.

I had worked with other email providers and ConstantContact has always been the failsafe way to go… then I was introduced to MailChimp.

[Just a head’s up this commercial is unsponsored and unsoclicited… I’m just all about it already and want you all to know about it!]

I kicked the tires for a little bit and two weeks ago we made the jump from ConstantContact to MailChimp and I’m already bananas for it.

Here’s a few reasons why…

They Have a Sense of Humor

From signing up for an account to the mundane task of creating and sending an email, they make it fun experience. They have little bits of humor peppered throughout the steps you take. Like, once you send an email it will say “Horray! You sent an email…” and gives you a few options including “eat a banana.”

Or, if someone unsubscribes from your list, you can opt to get an email notification and it reads, “well, maybe they weren’t that into you.”

Products that have a sense of humor and personality are winners in my book.

The Interface is Easy to Understand

Design matters. Their interface is easy to understand, visually appealing, and incredibly easy to use. Even a monkey could figure it out. [Bad joke?]

It’s Customizable

For a small fee you can remove their logo from your emails. You can make the emails look like they legitimately came from your organization without someone else’s branding all over it.

Sign up forms for the email lists are also customizable. You can make them look and feel like your church website and other church communications. They have a small ‘powered by MailChimp’ branding on them, but it’s minimal.

Great Templates You’ll Actually Use

Their templates are actually useful. Their pre-designed ones are versatile and ones I’d actually use.

And, if you know HTML or have a friend that does, they make it super easy to customize your emails.

It’s Cheaper

For the number of contacts we have, its actually about $15 a month cheaper than ConstantContact. Doesn’t seem like much, but when you stretch that over a year or two, that’s a pretty great savings.

And, if you’re a smaller church, you can have up 500 subscribers and send up to 3,000 emails per month [that would be 6 emails per month to a list of 500] for FREE!

Free Image Hosting

This is probably one of the hugest advantages in my opinion. Free UNLIMITED image hosting. I can’t tell you how many times we had to upgrade with ConstantContact or delete old images because we had exceeded our limit.  Not the case with these guys.

AND, when you’re looking for an image, instead of seeing a list of filenames, you can actually see thumbnails. Huge win.

They are also connected with Flickr and iStockPhoto so you can seamlessly use photos you’ve uploaded or purchase them and size them to fit appropriately using picknick.

Social Media Integration

With a simple click of a mouse you have a tweet posted as soon as you mail a campaign that links to a web version of your email campaign.

In the last two weeks, we’ve had many people RT our daily devotional emails and share them with their friends… we’ve also increased our subscribership by about 50 people. That’s HUGE!

They are Well Connected

MailChimp is friends with SurveyGizmo and EventBrite, so if you use either of those, you can easily integrate them into your email campaigns and even send email reminders to people who have RSVP’d to events or have yet to respond. We’ll be moving to using EventBrite more for small events since it’s something so many people already use anyway.

They also seamlessly integrate with other products including: PayPal, GoogleDocs, Wufoo, SalesForce, and Highrise to name a few.

Deeper Reports and Tracking

Numbers matter when you’re taking anything related to communications.

MailChimp offers great reporting that allows you to see reports based on specific lists instead of an overall view of all of the emails you send. This is helpful for us with our daily devotional email. We’re now able to see what days people are reading more, what content they’ve responded to, and what time of the day they read them. And we’re able to that very easily.

Also, MailChimp allows you to see where people are opening your emails from geographically… we had no idea we had so many people in other countries reading our daily devotional emails. That was super encouraging for us!

They’re Versatile

Most people who read our emails are reading them on their mobile devices. MailChimp is versatile and can adapt itself to mobile devices seamlessly, and allows new subscribers to select which format they prefer: plain text, HTML, or mobile.

Killer iPhone App

MailChimp has a great iPhone application that makes it simple and easy for me to check our stats, add a contract, track our social media share, and see other reports. When I’m on the go, it’s a handy way to stay connected, track numbers and easily add new contacts.

Training and Great Resources

If you’re new to email marketing they have an impressive collection of how-to videos and resources to help get you started and offer free online training.  Content like that in invaluable.

I’ve Barely Scratched the Surface

We’re just a couple of weeks into our relationship with MailChimp and we’re already huge fans. We know there’s so much more that it can do for us, but the value it’s already added has made the transition worth it for us. Anything else is going to be a bonus.  Here’s the full list of features they offer.

If you’re shopping around or want to get a better handle of your email communications and integrate your existing social media channels to your email, look no further than MailChimp.

Check it out and change the way your church communicates via email.

< /commercial >

What About You?

What email service are you using now?

What are some tips you have when it comes to emailing your church?

Do you use MailChimp? What do you love about it?

Imagine treating all of your email replies like a text message… short, brief, concise.

How much easier would life be? Avoid the fluff and get to the core of what you’re trying to say.

I think I’m going to opt for four sentences to start and see how that goes.

Read more about sentenc.es here.

I’ll post Drew’s notes on this when I get them, they will be more accurate than mine!

Are church websites effective tools for outreach and evangelism?

• John 17:18… as you have sent them into the world so I have sent them into the world.
• Facebook is now the “5th largest nation in the world.”
• The world is online so we need to be.
• 64% of wired Americans have used the internet for spiritual or religious purposes. – Pew Research Study
• 0.17% (1 person) said they were not a Christian and influenced to go to the church as a result of visiting the church website.
• 60 million Americans say they use the Internet to make big decisions.
• 6% of churches have Gospel presentation on their websites.
• At present, church websites are ineffective tools of evangelism.
• One possible reason… if you’re not a Christian, you’re not going to go to a church website to learn about God.

How are people finding the church website?

• On average, 25% are on a search looking for it.
• 43% are direct.
• 30% are clicking on a referral.
• What does search hits mean? Non-Christians are finding your site.
• Direct traffic typically means its people in your church, who know.
• The search represents the content of your site and how well it’s laid out.
• The higher the direct traffic, the higher the community involvement
• Referral means your online presence elsewhere.

During usability studies, 88% of web users went to a search engine first to accomplish a task.

Traditional church marketing has its message and you hope it connects with the person’s situation… online searches allow us the opportunity to be a “just in time” church based on what people are searching for.

• Life change – reach people when they need the church the most. (depression, marriage, health, death, illness, transition).
• Think about your town and how you can optimize the life changes people face in your community.
• People stay on a page for about 45 seconds… what are you going to do with that time?
• What are you going to do with the traffic that comes to your web? (Wherever it comes from!)
• Church websites are an effective tool for reaching Christians.
• 16% of people say that the church website is the first time they heard about the church
• #1 area people went on websites for information for new people… how are you thinking for that population?
• Many churches are creating websites for internal purposes, but what are you doing to connect people on the outside.

There’s three populations of people who visit your church website: visitors, beginners (3-6 months), and regulars (6+ months).

• 30% of people who were new to the church said the website is where they learn about the church.
• 77% said the church website was very important in making the decision of whether they were going to visit your church or not.
• A church’s website is people’s first filter to find a church.
• Spend your homepage connecting with first-time visitors and new people to your church.

Triperspectival Design

• Normative
• Existential
• Situational

• What do you want to communicate about your vision?
• What behaviors do you want the visitors to imitate?
• 82% of beginners say the website was important in their participation in the church community.
• 45% said it was important for their spiritual growth.
• 73% said the website was helpful in their evangelism efforts.
• 76% of regulars said the web was still important in their involvement in their church community.
• 47% said it was an active part of their spiritual growth and discipleship.
• 52% of regulars said it was important in sharing their faith.
• 82% of regulars visit the church website at least once a week.

Web Development – Developing a Church Web Strategy

• Internet Presence Management – how and what is your presence online? We have to develop a strategy and lead our people that way, or people will be all over the place. Where are your people online? What are they using? Is all your info on Facebook? Google Groups, etc? Think about the principal issues and how you’re going to accomplish them.
• Website Development - what behaviors do you want from people?
• Community Development - how are you going to engage your community? How do you create space for community online and use Facebook missionally?
• Church Management - online donations, event registration, etc.

—

• Just for fun: John’s full name is John Charles Dickey Dyer
• One of the worst things you can do is imagine that technology is neutral.
• There’s to camps… tech lovers and tech haters.
• Both sides use the word “change”
• Tech lovers say it will “change” for good.
• Tech haters say it will “change” for the worse.
• It’s hard to balance our use of technology.
• Humans make tools…. our tools make us.
• What we create has influence back on us.
• We become the things that we behold.
• Psalm 1 … if we sit with those who are righteous we become righteous.
• We tend to believe that about many things, but not about our use of technology.
• Technology is an extension of humanity.
• Technology can be an amputation of humanity.

Evolution of New Technology

• Excitement – “YES! I got a shovel!”
• Difficulty – After you use it, you get blisters
• Transformation – You get stronger as a result of using it.

What kind of tool do you want to become?

Technology often has unintended effects. Most of us don’t think a lot about those effects. We just use what we’re told to use… whatever comes along and what’s new. Do we really need it?

Ages of Technology

• Oral – community memorizes common information.
• Print – logical individuals. (aka… The Bible is true. The Bible says God exists. Therefore, God exists). Many of our beliefs rest on rationale before faith.
• Image – emotional story tellers. We are surrounded by images… we tend to think of how to emotionally convey things with story, instead of logic. That’s the technology we use today.
• Machine – tireless producers. We became what we beheld… machines worked hard, we should work hard.
• Computer – data gatherers.
• Interwebs – loosely re-connected community?

There’s a world of disconnection and reconnection that happens with technology. If someone bothers us, we can block or unfriend them. We have switches.

What the Scripture says about Technology

• The story moves from the garden to the city.
• Who made the stuff in the city?
• Our human creativity is written into the story.
• What we create plays into the story.
• The First Technology in the Bible: clothing (Genesis, Adam & Eve).
• Rebels against God – expresses Imago Dei
• God’s Imago Dei is reflected in our creativty.
• Redeems the effects of the Fall – Foreshadows His return.
• Cain and the City – Cain builds a city, a place that’s alternate from the garden. (Gen 4)
• All the people who made tools and art came from Cain’s city.
• Jesus and the Cross – Jesus was a carpenter. From his job we get the word “technology.” The very tool He worked with was the tool He died on.
• God and the new City – God recreates everything and redeems it.
• God redeems human works.
• We offer redemption through what we create but it can’t compare to what God will give us.

New Testament

• Paul constantly expressed his desire to be with people.  (2 Tim 1:4)
• John didn’t want to use technology, but he did! (2 John 1:12)
• They used technology when they couldn’t be present with people.

Technology should help us stay connected when we can’t be face-to-face with people. Being face-to-face matters. Community sometimes sucks. Being face to face means you have to have a commitment to people you don’t decide to be with. Online community is a different kind of community.

Using Technology without Technology Using You

1. Deny the premise. You can’t use technology without it affecting you.
2. Experiment with Technology. Do something different. (Ill: Don’t take a Bible to church, just sit and listen… experience it differently.)
3. What do I want to cultivate? What do you want to get? What does it require for me to be “good” at it? Is that something you want?
4. Work both through and against technology. Jesus came as a Jew… he fully absorbed the culture to be with them. At the same time, He worked against them, He condemned things they do. We have to be incarnate like Jesus was… meaning we work through and against our technological culture.
5. Use technology as a means, not an end. We use a car as a means to get to an end. Or, we get a crazy awesome car… and use it so owning it is the end, the goal.
6. Create for a new world. All we create, all we do should be for eternity… for something that’s lasting.
7. Become a tool. Influence others for the glory of God. Be a tool He can use.

—
Monk Development and a number of other faith-based media outlets are sponsoring a study of the Church online… looking at how churches are using and interacting with social media and the web. [Check out Drew's blog for more.]

Some results they found…

• 51% of participating churches are on Facebook
  - Churches are using Facebook as an extension of their church.
  - More informational, used more as communications vehicle, less of a community building presence.
• Limited use of MySpace, Second Life, GoogleGroups, etc.
• 21% on Twitter
• A small number are using a members portal or private community site (Unifyer, TheCommon.org, 360Hubs, etc).
• 82% of surveyed churches didn’t even know about the different products out there.
• Encourage your church to register your church name on different social media outlets so you have rights to your name.
• Church networking and community sites have made little inroads into the church.
• A problem with all of the different avenues out there is that there’s not a collected, central spot to communicate from… especially if your church is not leading the way and providing a consistent platform for people to use.

Social Media Desires
What feature/funcationality are people in our churches looking for from our church websites?

• Event Sign-up/RSVP’s.
• Post Prayer Requests.
• Connect People to Service Opportunities.
• Connect with Small Groups.
• Integration with church website.
• Resource sharing.
• Ability to access TV/phone directory.

Congregations didn’t care about:

• blogging
• ability to post classifieds
• ability to post photos in photo galleries
• ability to post jobs

Most mainstream social networking sites do no offer churches the seamless solutions they seek.

Questions to Ask on Building Community

1. Is virtual community real community?
2. What is Biblical community? How are we living out Biblical community in a real way?
3. How can technology assist in this process? It can assist, but it cannot replace. It must drive people into real relationships.

Discipleship

1. How many of you feel like you have been discipled online? Online discipleship is a dangerous thing when it’s done outside of real life relationships. It’s more than courses, training and learning… it’s about relationships.
2. How can technology assist this process? There are tools and resources we can use to communicate and enhance discipleship.

Most church online media is used for communication, contact, event and small group management, etc. Primarily focused on “us” and not focused on the individual and not contributing to building community, connecting people, etc.

Top challenges of using social media in churches.

• Amount of effort required
• Identifying appropriate goals/ROI
• Fostering real community
• Cultural resistance from congregation or church leadership.

For more information about the State of the Church Online Study, click here.

Also, check out the Cobblestone Community Network, a new tool designed to help the Church be the Church, online… designed by Drew + his team at Ekklesia360.

At the end of the day, no matter what capacity you serve in the Church or in ministry, that is why we do what we do.

The “world” as we know it has changed.

We no longer need to go to the world to reach the world.

Well, of course we still need people “going” – that’s a no-brainer. BUT, our world is getting smaller and our ability to go to the world is as easy as a click of a mouse.

All that being said I heard two things today that helped give me some perspective:

1. Facebook is bigger than all but four the countries in the world. It just passed 200 million users… (via @michaelhyatt
2. 32% of the influential churches in America are on Facebook (via @toddrhoades) …

So… here’s my take on all this.

32% isn’t a big number.

In fact, I think it’s way too small.

I recently talked with a friend whose church blocks employees from going to Facebook. I nearly wept. Seriously?

We have an unprecedented opportunity to expand our reach through the different networks that social media opens up to us.

And, social media is exploding.

I’ve talked a bit about how Park uses Twitter, but since today’s theme is Facebook, I wanted to take a second to talk about how we’re leveraging Facebook. We’re not experts and have a long way to go, but we’re getting there.

We’ve been using Facebook at Park for awhile – first through groups and more recently with Pages.

There are quite a few Park Facebook Groups, and through them, although there is some overlap, we’re connected to close to 2,000 people.

And more recently, we started our Facebook Page back in November and are just crossed over 850 “fans.”

To be honest, I was a bit hesitant about using Facebook, I wasn’t sure if people would utilize it as a means to connect with us, but the more we’re putting out there, the more people are engaging.

And the thing about Facebook that is so exciting to me is that as our people participate and RSVP to Events we post, or comment on photos or videos we post, their friends (who we may have never had the chance to connect with before) are now seeing that “Joe” is attending our Easter services, or that “Jane” commented on a video we posted. And there is a seed planted.

Bottom line: we’ve got to be out there.

We’ve got to be where people are at. We’ve got make our content more accessible to them in a platform they already use and not try and create our own.

Be it Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or whatever…we need to GO to where they are online!

While some churches have varying demographics, at the end of the day, as the world interacts and communicates more and more online, the church needs to be present online, or we’ll risk becoming irrelevant.

And churches that are making the moves and strides to be more present online are the ones that are going to become most effective at reaching people in the future.

If your church blocks Facebook or other social media, have the tough convo, say what needs to be said… there’s a whole world out there (online) that needs you there!

If your church continues to avoid being online it will run the risk of going offline.

Go into the online world… and proclaim the message of the Gospel!

Which made me look at Park and how much email we generate.

When I first came on staff, Park was sending a ridiculous amount of email. Like, you would not believe. Some ministry leaders had direct access to a list serve and would send emails whenever they pleased. I think in one week I accumulated over 30 emails from different ministries in the church.

CONSOLIDATE

We consolidated. We took away access to the list serve, created email lists for the different affinity groups in our church and moved to letting each of them do a weekly email in addition to a churchwide weekly enews. We let people opt in for what emails they want to receive and will RARELY scour our database to harvest addresses.

YES, WE EMAIL DAILY

Did I add we also send a daily email? We have over 2,000 people that get a daily devotional email we call 8 Minutes with God. It follows a through-the-Bible reading program and is written by a group of pastors, elders and ministry leaders.

STATS AS THEY STAND

I checked today… in the past 3 months we’ve sent over 152,114 emails via Constant Contact…

• 2,981 (2%) of them Bounced, meaning they were bad addresses, etc
• 45,073 (30%) of them were Opened
• 11,247 (25%) links from emails were clicked
• and 31 (.1%) of them were forwarded to friends.

The national average for Religious organizations is a 15.8% open rate and a 3% click through rate, so we’re not doing too bad, above average if you will.

IN SUMMARY

Although we have a strong open rate, I’m still convinced we probably could scale back a little and send what people really need vs what we think we need to get to them. I think too often we force feed people information that’s important to us, but not to the people we’re sending it to.

It’s a process.

FORGOT TO MENTION

We were recently told we were awarded the prestigious honor of being a 2008 Constant Contact All Star… apparently the fact that we’ve sent over a million emails in the past four years got us some recognition.

If you are a newer reader, I’ve been blogging about how we’ve changed the way we communicate at Park: using texting, updating our logo, and moving to doing a monthly program instead of a weekly.

Today I want to talk to you about how we’re changing the way we do volunteering, as well as connecting our church community to one another.

Last spring I went to visit Mars Hill Bible Church with some friends. It happened to be the day they were talking about a new initiative some developers in their church had created called TheCommon.org.

Like any church (especially one that is large), they were struggling with how to connect people to volunteer opportunities, as well as how to manage requests people were making for classified-type requests: people needing household items, rides, help around the house, needs for clothing, etc.

Mars Hill began emailing out a list of ways for people could get involved and volunteer, as well as needs that had been expressed by people in their community, but it wasn’t working.

Then TheCommon.org came into reality.

What it’s not…

• A Christian social networking site
• ‘Craigslist’ for churches
• Another annoying idea

What it is…

• A tool to connect people with needs to people with abilities
• A means to flatten communication… meaning that we don’t have to go through a heirarchy or a process… people do this on their own and staff and volunteers simply moderate to make sure everything is above board.
• A way for people within your church community to express a need

How it works…

• People register in-person at your church… yeah, in person. They can pre-register from home, but they have to show up in-person and show a photo ID to verify themselves for use of TheCommon.org. It might sound crazy, but it’s a simple step for safety to ensure people are who they say they are and that they actually attend your church.
• Users create a profile listing their abilities (i.e. “I can paint…”, “I want to help with tutoring opportunities..”, “I can give someone a ride…”).
• Needs and opportunities are posted by church staff, partner ministries, or other users, and are categorized (i.e. “We need someone to paint..”, “Kids need tutoring…”, “I need a ride to O’Hare…”)
• TheCommon.org then notifies users who have abilities that match a need and let’s them know there’s an opportunity for them to get involved.
• If they are interested, they join and are put into direct contact with one another to make the need or project happen.

It’s really that simple.

How It’s Worked for Us (Already)

We launched TheCommon.org last Sunday. Ben Gott, one of the co-creators of TheCommon and one of the brains behind The Brilliance blog was here to help introduce it to our church.

It may be a bit premature to blog about it (I was going to wait), but we’ve already had a cool story emerge from it:

• A single mom joined TheCommon.org on Sunday morning.
• On Sunday night she posted a need saying she was having challenges getting ready for her first baby.
• On Monday I saw the need and let our Family Ministry Assistant know about it.
• She reached out to some of Moms Groups about the need.
• Turns out one of the Moms Groups meets 2 blocks away from where the mom lives and meets on her day off.
• They’ve already reached out to her and between all of them will help her to get everything she needs.
• All because we created a space to let her voice be heard.

We’ve also had a guy who needed a wrench to fix his sink find one, but that story isn’t as cool!

So far…

• We have close to 600 people on TheCommon.org
• We’ve reached out and trained six of our Partner Ministries (ministries in the city we support and send volunteers to) on how to use TheCommon, so they are posting needs and connecting with people in our church community who can help.
• We have 60 active projects people can get involved in.
• Close to 100 people have already committed to volunteering on the projects.
• And we’ve only had this up and running for six days.

There’s a lot more I could say about it, but at a very simple level, we know TheCommon.org is going to revolutionize the way we do volunteering, the way we communicate needs and opportunities, and will help our “big” church feel “smaller” as people have a way to interact with one another and express a need and reach out for help.

I’m a fan. And for our context, this is a perfect way to get the job done effiicently.

If you’re curious about learning more, feel free to shoot me an email or read more about TheCommon.org on their website.

And not some canned “year through the Bible” or “Our Daily Bread”-type emails, but one that was written by someone in the church for the church.

I thought it was crazy.

The manpower, the energy… it just seemed like a lot.

Initially the emails all related to the message on Sunday… and were written by one person.

Over the past two years the format has changed a bit here and there, and we’ve moved from one author to multiple authors (pastors, elders and lay leaders).

Readership and subscribership started to dip a little bit towards the end of last year… we were struggling to maintain 1,300 subscribers at a 20% open rate.

Our team got together and re-purposed the whole idea of the email and agreed it was something we wanted to continue to do, but in a new way… as a church, we are going to go through the Bible chronologically over the next two years.

We promoted it pretty heavily over the past few weeks and it paid off…  our subscribership as of right now is around 1,800 with over 75% open rate (which is amazing)!

We’ve had people forwarding these emails, getting their family members and friend to join us in the journey, and have added more subscribers over the weekend.

Sometimes you don’t need to stop what you’re doing, you just need to stop and ask why you’re doing it and what you could do to make it better… and worth people’s while.

We got this email last week, which I thought was really cool…

Check out 8 Minutes here… wanna join with Park in our journey? Subscribe here.